Western Digital Sued to Permanently Block SMR in NAS HDDs

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WD-HDD

Western Digital continues to face fallout for its resolution to ship shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs in NAS products. The law firm suing the company has updated its submitting so to add predominant technical data and is not always inquiring for an endless payday for itself. Instead, the plaintiffs ask that Western Digital be forbidden from promoting SMR drives as being lawful for NAS capabilities.

Whilst you haven’t been following the story, we’ll summarize it beneath:

Ragged arduous drives utilize CMR (Ragged Magnetic Recording). They write data to magnetic tracks and skim data off these tracks utilizing a power head. CMR drives lay every note down independently, with guard banding on either side. In SMR drives, the tracks are laid down in partly overlapping type.

seagate-smr-vs-conventional-hard-drive-writing

Seagate has also deployed shingled magnetic recording to boost the areal density of its power platters, though the skills isn’t a giant fit for user products.

This come of overlapping data enables for better density per HDD platter, theoretically thinking fewer platters and saving the capability manufacturer some money. The efficiency trade-offs, on the opposite hand, are predominant, in particular in sure kinds of write workloads.

The predicament with placing SMR drives in a NAS is that they’re terrible at it. Whereas efficiency is acceptable (if behind) in some overall utilize-cases, there are other right-world instances that SMR drives simply can not tackle.

SMR drives don’t develop writes the the same come an HDD does — they really battle by a program/erase cycle extra equivalent to an SSD, because “shingling” the tracks makes it very unlikely to write to staunch one note at a time. The power head has to be taught the data off a entire block of the arduous power earlier than writing the block lend a hand to disk with its now-modified contents. This requirement is why SMR drives are unsuited to sure kinds of labor.

A month ago, cease-users chanced on WD became placing SMR drives in its WD Crimson product family. Crimson is namely meant for NAS capabilities and Western Digital advertises the capability as lawful for user and industrial deployment. There’s a lawsuit in opposition to the company for this, in step with the truth that CMR and SMR drives can’t be deployed in some RAID arrays side-by-side, and that WD is selling these drives into products that could presumably perchance’t utilize them smartly.

The plaintiffs within the case are no longer alleging that the SMR drives are substandard, nonetheless that Western Digital has engaged in counterfeit promoting by selling these products for uses they are able to not materially fulfill. Here’s no longer in ask: It’s been factually demonstrated that file systems like ZFS and sure kinds of RAID configurations are incompatible with SMR.

The plaintiffs and their attorneys are no longer searching for money damages. What they want is a ruling declaring Western Digital can not advertise SMR drives as being lawful for NAS systems when they deal are no longer. The updates to the fashioned criticism add the experiences of the five additional plaintiffs becoming a member of the suit and present additional technical detail on how SMR drives are unsuited to the the same workloads as CMR drives. The argument in play is that Western Digital violated the California Customers Out of the ordinary Remedies Act, User Safety Statute, Unfounded Promoting Regulation, and Unfair Rivals Regulation.

In a separate story, ServeTheHome has uncovered proof that WD became namely wide awake that its SMR drives wouldn’t tear smartly with the ZFS file gadget. How cease all of us know? Properly, an HGST engineer gave a presentation at OpenZFS in 2015 noting that Power Managed SMR (which is what WD uses) and ZFS were a basically unhappy fit. Given that HGST is a subsidiary of Western Digital, it’s definite that on the least a few of the necessary company’s workers were responsive to ability issues five years ago. ServeTheHome has extra particulars on these aspects.

Western Digital’s Unacceptable Silence

Western Digital has stayed mute on this misfortune for months, now. Whereas the company did post a checklist of which of its drives were SMR and which own been CMR, it continues to ship SMR drives as tumble-in replacements for instances they are demonstrably unable to meet. The corporate has no longer changed its messaging and it hasn’t changed its products.

There’s a right predicament right here. Western Digital advertises Crimson as the NAS line. It does no longer advertise Crimson as “The arduous power family where some of our drives are universally smartly wonderful, and some of them aren’t!”

Potentially an even thing, that.

Whilst it is probably going you’ll presumably presumably like to make utilize of WD Crimson, peek the EFRX family of arduous drives — these are the CMR products. If that your NAS is smartly wonderful with SMR products, by all manner, be at liberty to make utilize of them. Nevertheless if Western Digital doesn’t preserve some extra or much less motion to extra meaningfully shipshape up these issues, I wouldn’t continue to know the company’s products. Extra investigation has proven that WD has in actual fact been stealth-shipping drives like this since on the least 2018, and the company’s cease-users own been searching for to point out that this is a severe predicament for on the least that long.

I would no longer imagine an SMR power in a RAID array except it is probably going you’ll presumably presumably furthermore own a disclose reason to imagine the capability will characteristic smartly. The value contrast between the CMR and SMR drives is rarely any longer huge ample to invent the headache value it.

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