Anyway WD seems to do best as they can in this situation.
Allow me to strongly disagree.
The best they can would include the following:
- Public apology
- Pro-active offer to replace all Red SMR drives for CMR-versions with the same or better warranty
- Free cross-shipment of replacement drives - CMR comes to customer first, SMRs then get shipped back to WD
- Firm commitment to disclose to all customers re: what technology resides in their drives. Not under NDA, but posted publicly.
- Removal of all DM-SMR drives from the NAS line since WD staff have acknowledged that DM-SMR has no business in NAS applications.
Want to create an "archive" line of SMR drives with longer MBTFs, like the Red line? Go head and make one... competitors have the purple line for that purpose, for example (Video surveillance Archive).
...but do not
- ... start shipping SMR lines into existing Red NAS sales channels without giving everyone a big heads-up.
- ... delay acknowledging what's going on as long as possible
- ... only start acknowledging what's going on when large websites like STH, ArsTechnica, etc. start publicizing the issue
- ... then only allow customers on a per-call basis to maybe get their SMR drives replaced
- ... continue shipping DMSMR drives that are fundamentally unsuited for NAS applications into the NAS channel.
- .... etc.
WD is doing the bare minimum other than allowing CMR-SMR drive replacements on a one-off basis. That's likely driven by the class-action lawsuit they've been slapped with - i.e. they'll claim that there is minimal harm, no customer standing re: damages because any customer who cares about this issue can, eventually, get a replacement. That in turn may get them off with a smaller fine.
However, the customer has to notice, diagnose the issue, know what's going on. Many customers cannot be bothered to know the most minute differences between NAS and consumer-grade drives. Marketing allegedly makes it easy to tell the difference and the prices for "NAS-grade" drives are certainly significantly higher. Combine that with the intermittent nature of DM-SMR drive performance issues in a NAS application and the customer may believe that some other component is causing the issue (at least in NAS systems that are lightly-used).
So, many customers will learn to live with a intermittent NAS just as consumers learned to live with faulty-GM ignition switches, Takada Airbags, or any number of other defective products - dangerously. Quantifying the resultant damages will be difficult for most consumers since the value of time is pretty arbitrary in a class-action lawsuit.
Coming back to the drives, only host-aware or host-managed SMR drives are potentially suitable for NAS applications, and those are only sold on a B2B basis. So the very drives that *might* -
with a lot of work by the likes of iXsystems and the rest of the ZFS development team - be made to play nice with NAS systems are not available to consumers while the DM-SMR drives that everyone acknowledges as unsuitable for NAS applications are.
Sorry, WD is sending mixed messages here. If they didn't want to play consumers for suckers, WD would stop shipping / marketing / etc. "Red" DM-SMR drives for NAS applications.