On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 6:52 PM Mark Knecht <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 1:16 PM Rich Freeman <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Up until a few weeks ago I would have advised the same, but WD was > > just caught shipping unadvertised SMR in WD Red disks. This is going > > to at the very least impact your performance if you do a lot of > > writes, and it can be incompatible with rebuilds in particular with > > some RAID implementations. Seagate and Toshiba have also been quietly > > using it but not in their NAS-labeled drives and not as extensively in > > general. > > I read somewhere that they knew they'd been caught and were coming clean.
Yup. WD was caught. Then they first came out with a "you're using it wrong" sort of defense but they did list the SMR drives. Then they came out with a bit more of an even-handed response. The others weren't caught as far as I'm aware but probably figured the writing was on the wall since no doubt everybody and their uncle is going to be benchmarking every drive they own. > Another case of unbridled capitalism and consumers being hurt. I agree. This video has a slightly different perspective. It doesn't disagree on that conclusion, but it does explain more of the industry thinking that got us here (beyond the simple/obvious it saves money): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSionmmunMs -- Rich
