News Lawsuit due to SMR HDDs being sold as suitable for RAID

[mikeymikec]

Western Digital shingled out in lawsuit for sneaking RAID-unfriendly tech into drives for RAID arrays

Probing by El Reg's Chris Mellor highlighted in class-action complaint

www.theregister.com

At long last. I've been wary of replacing my 1TB HDD because I didn't want to get a performance lemon.

 

[Igo69]

Why would WD do this in the 1st place and then reveal it to the public? What is the catch? They obviously knew that they will get sued for this.
Sometimes i dont understand these corporate decisions, anyone works there and maybe can explain?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm glad that they're getting SUED. No "NAS drive" should use SMR tech. No-way.

WORM-like applications, like backups, that simply append backup files to the end, sure, use "Archive" or "SMR" drives, in singles, for that application. FINE. Just make sure to disclose CLEARLY that those drives in those external USB 3.0 enclosures, are ARCHIVAL or SMR / SHINGLED drives, and more oriented towards WORM-type applications.

 

[mikeymikec]

It's not just WD doing it, I know Seagate does it as well.

 

[Fallen Kell]

They all released drives that were SMR and didn’t label the disk as such. The real problem was that WD put them in model lines designed for home RAID and NAS usage. That is the real problem. All big three manufacturers initially labeled the SMR disks as such initially, but my guess is they didn’t see good sales data on the drives and as such quietly started releasing new models which were not labeled as SMR to try and boost sales. Sure, for some applications SMR is fine. But really, if you look at the market, the only big market factors for traditional hard drive sales is now for consumer and small corporate RAID systems, something that SMR utterly fails.

 

[aigomorla]

hy would WD do this in the 1st place and then reveal it to the public?

They didnt reveal it.
They schucked it in the lower tier drives, hoped people would be running single drive config and prayed no one would use them in a massive ZFS / RAID 6/10 array.

When people started to realize file transfer rates were absymal compared to the higher tier red's, they then did independant investigation and realized WD scamed them.

Seagate and the other vendors were smart tho, because they did not put them on there NAS drives which do not typically go in ZFS / RAID 6/10.
SMR by single drive standards is OK, testing has shown this, but when it goes into prolong high cap storage transfers, they start to tank and rebuilding redudant arrays can take AGES... and if your unlucky, you can have another drive fail while its rebuilding.

Honestly i also do not understand which smart VP thought this was a good idea at WD, and i can see upper management asking him to pack up his stuff pretty soon.

 

[mikeymikec]

To whomever downvoted me, Seagate are doing it, just not being aimed directly for NAS/RAID.

For example:

Does anyone have a new Seagate portable USB 3.0 drive to test with?

I'm puzzling over the very hit-and-miss performance of a drive I've just bought for a customer. Here's a benchmark I did just now: The drive on the left is my own Seagate portable drive that I bought a few years ago that I have no problems with. The drive on the right is the one I've just...

forums.anandtech.com

IMO any SMR HDD should be explictly labelled as such, and the fact that some HDD manufacturers aren't doing so is inherently dishonest because the write performance sucks. WD got hit with a lawsuit because their product was strictly speaking not fit for purpose, whereas a crappy performance HDD aimed at general purpose applications isn't strictly unfit for purpose, it just sucks.