Lack of SMR disclosures in the HDD business

TinkerTry makes no claims to be a news site, but I do write a bit about topics that affect home lab enthusiasts including storage, with spinning drives for things like backups certainly a recurring theme here.

So much of YouTube has a whole lot of flashy thumbnails these days intended to draw your eyeballs in, hoping you'll thumbs-up and subscribe, helping the algorithm to move the flashiest videos above the noise. Such clips tend to be an ephemeral, a long-form tweet of sorts, spreading quickly like a virus wildfire, but forgotten just as fast.

Then there's videos that stand out for the words, leaving an indelible impression, a just reward for enjoying good old-fashion journalism. That's right, the power of words. Pure, logical, with the passion toned down just the right amount to get through to IT Professionals and tech enthusiasts effectively, without the overblown hyperbole.

I cannot possibly explain this whole hard disk drive Shingled Magnetic Recording issue any better than Patrick Kennedy and Chris Mellor already have.

First, have a careful watch, listen, then ponder what Patrick has said here, and how he went about saying it.

So,, it seems the more economical drives are being marketed selectively, targeting the most vulnerable buyers, those most likely to bump into trouble when their simple NAS ejects a lower-performing drive from their set-it-and-forget-it array. A drive listed as for use in a NAS, mind you. Seriously?

Now that you've watched, there's also the article version of what you just watched. It's such a gem of craftsmanship, notice the careful balance of:

1. Wisdom - Patrick has clearly earned his stripes, in the heart of Silicon Valley.
2. Grace - He chose to take the high road, while still acknowledging something fishy seems to have gone down here.
3. Reason - Carefully laid down arguments, supporting statements, powerful conclusions, and a call to action.

• Surreptitiously Swapping SMR into Hard Drive Lines Must Stop
  Apr 26 2020 by Patrick Kennedy at STH

  ...
  You can read the full statement here. One very strange note on this one is that it is authored “by Western Digital.” That is a bit surprising as that kind of customer care statement would normally have an executive sponsor attached. This is the official company position, however, no executive seemed to want to take ownership of it which seemed a bit strange.
  ...

See also Chris Mellor's article that started it all, followed by a long list of articles that seem to indicate some progress already!

• Western Digital admits 2TB-6TB WD Red NAS drives use shingled magnetic recording
  Apr 14 2020 by Chris Mellor at Block & Files

  Some users are experiencing problems adding the latest WD Red NAS drives to RAID arrays and suspect it is because they are actually shingled magnetic recording drives submarined into the channel.
  ...

There's a podcast about storage that I've listened to for years, see Chris Evans and Martin Glassborow on the excellent Storage Unpacked podcast, with Chris Mellor making many appearances.

Apr 30 2020 Update

Appended Storage Unpacked to the article above.

See also at TinkerTry

All articles about Storage.

• Synology DiskStation DS1618+ NAS First Look featuring 10GbE!)
  Mar 11 2019 by Paul Braren

See also

Progress already? Have a look at these recent article:

• Toshiba publishes list of consumer HDDs that use shingled magnetic recording
  Apr 29 2020 by Chris Mellor at Block & Files

• Surreptitiously Swapping SMR into Hard Drive Lines Must Stop
  Apr 26 2020 by Patrick Kennedy at STH

• Western Digital begins mending fences in WD Red NAS drive SMR spat
  Apr 24 2020 by Chris Mellor at Block & Files

• Western Digital implies WD Red NAS SMR drive users are responsible for overuse problems
  Apr 23 2020 by Chris Mellor at Block & Files

• SMR in disk drives: PC vendors also need to be transparent
  Apr 20 2020 by Chris Mellor at Block & Files

• Toshiba desktop disk drives have shingles too
  Apr 16 2020 by Chris Mellor at Block & Files

• Western Digital admits 2TB-6TB WD Red NAS drives use shingled magnetic recording
  Apr 14 2020 by Chris Mellor at Block & Files

  Some users are experiencing problems adding the latest WD Red NAS drives to RAID arrays and suspect it is because they are actually shingled magnetic recording drives submarined into the channel.
  **...

• Updated: HDD manufacturers found selling slow SMR drives unsuitable for NAS RAID environments
  Several buyers faced RAID rebuilding issues
  Apr 21 202 by Humza Aamir at TechSpot

  A hot potato: Reports of WD, Seagate, and Toshiba quietly selling SMR disks have been confirmed by the respective manufacturers. SMR or shingled magnetic recording makes for denser and cheaper drives but also results in very slow write performance, limiting their use to archiving applications where such latency is endurable. Read on for the exact models that have been found to be using SMR.

This is a unique piece with a fun visual on how SMR drives work, followed by some IBM Server hardware with lots of spinning drives in action.