4tb WD reds/whites in external enclosures

Yorick

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Nov 4, 2018
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You should expect these to be re-badged WDxxEFAX or equivalent Blue (DM-SMR), up to the 6TB enclosures. 8TB and up are safe, for now.

Shucking has been a thing for a long while, it's a great way to get affordable drives. Just watch out for DM-SMR, or choose to go DM-SMR, rather than "ending up with one".
 

Constantin

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May 19, 2017
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Last edited:

Yorick

Wizard
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Nov 4, 2018
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due to the issues they present in a NAS environment

Thanks for linking to that, that’s interesting! Note he speaks of HM-SMR, and the additional engineering to make that work - code and flash cache layer. For their use case, the 10 to 15% cost advantage is erased by that added complexity, so they don’t go there.

Agreed that DM-SMR is the worst possible SMR type for a NAS. I’m not aware of anything off the shelf that talks to HA-SMR or HM-SMR, though. Which means the shorthand of “your default stance should be “no SMR”” is entirely reasonable.
 
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