The worst thing that WD done is adopting SMR on NAS brand without announce. SMR for parity RAID is completely disaster.
Adopting SMR on Desktop brand is acceptable compared to NAS brand, but it should be announced.
I just got fucked by this change in models - I had an array full of 6TB WD Reds, had one fail, ordered a replacement. Rebuilding the RAID-Z3 took over 2 weeks. Previous replacements had taken under 2 days - usually under 1.
Passing SMR drives off without saying anything, especially when that exact model had been a PMR drive prior, is incredibly anti-customer.
What's going on, is that WD has for years, sold a PMR 3TB drive called "3TB WD Red".
Suddenly, without warning, the "3TB WD Red" is an SMR drive. Technically they changed the model number, but the marketing number (3 TB Red) remained the same.
Do you believe it is reasonable for customers to see this and expect that a drive called "WD 6TB Red" when you purchased previously and when you go to purchase it now, that are described identically, with no way to purchase the previous model, and know that the fundamentals of the storage medium have changed and completely flip it's performance characteristics?
Especially when the drive is specifically marketed as being RAID and NAS friendly - one of the primary differences between the Red and Green drives is disabling some of the sleep power saving mechanisms that are known to cause issues with RAID arrays. And they make it so that the drive is largely unusable in any parity based array? When minor revisions, updated firmware, etc., will result in minor changes to model numbers all the time?
I think the real answer here is to demand that disk manufacturers publish performance specifications. This leaves them free to change implementation details (which consumers usually don't know or care about) as long as the published specifications are accurate.
Then again, drive manufacturers are also known for changing what the definition of a unit of measurement means. Some of us remember when they arbitrarily changed the definition of a gigabyte nearly 20 years ago from 1<<30 bytes to 10^9 bytes - a nearly 7% difference! (See: https://www.zdnet.com/article/attention-hard-drive-manufactu...)
I don't really care if a drive is 150MB/s or 200MB/s. I understand that hard drive manufacturers change their technology on a regular basis (PMR, HAMR, etc. etc.). Adding platters, removing platters, increasing platter density, etc. etc. As hard drives change, so do their performance.
What makes this a sore spot, is that SMR drives have something like 1/8th the sustained write performance of PMR drives.
Think about how you went from HDD world into the SSD world a few years back. Except do that in reverse. SMR drives are great for archives, but they should never be sold as a mainstream solution, because their performance is so much worse than PMR.
> I don't really care if a drive is 150MB/s or 200MB/s.
You do care about performance - you say so in the next paragraph. In this case, it is rewrite performance. This is quantifiable and can be disclosed on spec sheets and labeling. I'm not saying the recording method can't be disclosed too, but I think to most consumers, the metrics are more important than the technology.
SMR is like, 30MB/s write speed best-case scenario. PMR is 200MB/s write speed, easy.
We're talking about 700% difference in performance. In the case of RAID5, you have many, many physical writes per OS-level write. If you have 5-hard drives storing 100MBs, you'll need to actually write 120MBs to disk.
