Okay, I wasn't paying attention and I also got bitten by this. What irks me is that I picked the WD60EFAX as an urgent replacement because I remembered this banner which is still on rotation in this forum:
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Once I received the second replacement drive, got the same failures as the first replacement and realized the first drive didn't have infant mortality and *then* came back here looking for help did I realize that "The Preferred Drives of FreeNAS and TrueNAS" needs a big asterisk that says "except for the WD Red in this picture."
Hello Bollar, Apologies for any unintended confusion. We try to be very specific about the drives to use. The advert only has WD Red Plus and WD Red Pro drives as well as the Ultrastars we use in TrueNAS Enterprise systems. We only advertise the drives we have qualified with TrueNAS and ZFS.. which happen to all be the CMR variety and have all proven to be generally very reliable. There are other WD drives not in this picture.
We recommend TrueNAS users do NOT use the new "WD Red" drives that use DM-SMR technology. We took the WD Red out of the banner picture.
The DM-SMR drives are OK for PC workloads and simple NAS systems, so Western Digital have decided to keep them in the product line. We can't require vendors to make sure all drives are ZFS-optimized. There will be some information coming about making these drives safer and perform a bit better, but we still don't recommend TrueNAS users buy them when they have a choice. WD has been very good in their return policy for those people impacted.