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Western Digital Shingled Out in Class Action Lawsuit

posted by martyb on Saturday May 30 2020, @01:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the AKA-herpes-zoster dept.

takyon writes:

Western Digital gets sued for sneaking SMR disks into its NAS channel

All three of the surviving conventional hard drive vendors—Toshiba, Western Digital, and Seagate—have gotten caught sneaking disks featuring Shingled Magnetic Recording technology into unexpected places recently. But Western Digital has been the most brazen of the three, and it's been singled out for a class action lawsuit in response.

Although all three major manufacturers quietly added SMR disks to their desktop hard drive line-up, Western Digital is the only one so far to slip them into its NAS (Network Attached Storage) stack. NAS drives are expected to perform well in RAID and other multiple disk arrays, whether ZFS pools or consumer devices like Synology or Netgear NAS appliances.

In sharp contrast to Western Digital's position on SMR disks as NAS, Seagate executive Greg Belloni told us that there weren't any SMR disks in the Ironwolf (competitor to Western Digital Red) line-up now and that the technology is not appropriate for that purpose.

[...] Hattis Law has initiated a class action lawsuit against Western Digital, accordingly. The lawsuit alleges both that the SMR technology in the newer Western Digital Red drives is inappropriate for the marketed purpose of the drives and that Western Digital deliberately "deceived and harm[ed] consumers" in the course of doing so.

Previously: AnandTech Interview With Seagate's CTO: New HDD Technologies Coming
Western Digital: Over Half of Data Center HDDs Will Use SMR by 2023
Seagate Caught Using SMR in Barracuda Compute and Desktop Drives

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by RandomFactor on Saturday May 30 2020, @02:43PM (1 child)

    by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Saturday May 30 2020, @02:43PM (#1001023) Journal

    Mostly write performance based from what I can figure.

    SMR drives will be made up of multiple zones, some that are "normal" and allow random reads and writes throughout the zone, and some that can only be written sequentially. For the sequential zones, there is a write pointer maintained for each zone that corresponds to where the next write must go. Depending on the mode, writing elsewhere in the zone will either be an error (in host-managed devices) or will lead to some kind of remapping of the write (for host-aware devices). That remapping may lead to latency spikes due to garbage collection at some later time.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @01:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @01:44AM (#1001985)

    The drives basically wear out like flash instead of traditional magnetic media. You only get so many writes to them before the sectors are toasted, and since that affects a whole chain of sectors, not just the one....