Re: Storm in a teacup?
"I would like to see some proper data on how this affects the performance of the drives in their intended use"
I kicked this off with Chris because the replacement 4TB REDs I got ti replacing aging ones in my home NAS went from 18 hour RAIDZ3 rebuilds on the old drives to failing to complete after 21 DAYS and WD were blowing off complaints.
RAIDZ3 rebuilds were _still_ 18 hours on the old REDs, and on Toshiba N300s + Seagate IronWolfs purchased to crosscheck. The "New" SMR REDs were the same price as the CMR REDs they replaced but more importantly the CMR drives were simply no longer available anyway. The N300s and Ironwolfs were slightly cheaper than the SMR REDs
That's when I started digging, found out about the shingling and realised they had bad firmware - both problems WD were denying but were fairly well documented in tech circles. THEN I found out about the SMR Barracudas and realised "ghost" networking problems my group had been chasing for over a year weren't caused by networking issues - we verified it was down to the SMR drives choking the desktop computers they were installed on.
WD and Seagate were empathically _refusing_ to tell media or customers whether drives were SMR or CMR. It was only when Chris confronted them with retailer lists (skinflint.co.uk) that they relented and admitted it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
