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
Related Stories
AnandTech interviewed Mark Re, SVP and Chief Technology Officer of Seagate, to talk about plans for upcoming hard disk drive (HDD) technologies.
Although shingled magnetic recording (SMR) lowers write speeds, a number of techniques help reduce the impact, such as banding together SMR tracks into certain zones with perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) zones covering the rest of the drive rather than shingling, or adding more SLC NAND and DRAM cache. Seagate will be expanding its use of SMR to increase density in client drives, not just "cold storage" drives, but will be using partial SMR/partial PMR and caching in order to mitigate write performance issues.
For the moment, Seagate won't be using helium outside of products for capacity-demanding datacenter customers (such as the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 10 TB HDD). The company can reduce fluid flow forces inside air-filled HDDs using purely mechanical solutions. On the other hand, Western Digital has introduced helium-filled drives aimed at consumers and has a marketing name for its technology (HelioSeal).
[Continues...]
Western Digital: Over Half of Data Center HDDs Will Use SMR by 2023
Western Digital said at OCP Global Summit last week that over half of hard drives for data centers will use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology in 2023. At present Western Digital is the only supplier of SMR HDDs managed by hosts, but the technology is gaining support by hardware, software, and applications.
[...] High-capacity hard drives are not going to be replaced by high-capacity SSDs any time soon, according to Western Digital. HDDs will continue to cost significantly less than SSDs on per-TB basis. Therefore, they will be used to store 6.5 times more data than datacenter SSDs in 2023.
SMR hard drive encoding is generally higher density but slower than traditional perpendicular recording.
Seagate 'submarines' SMR into 3 Barracuda drives and a Desktop HDD – Blocks and Files
Some Seagate Barracuda Compute and Desktop disk drives use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology which can exhibit slow data write speeds. But Seagate documentation does not spell this out.
Yesterday we reported Western Digital has submarined SMR drives into certain WD Red NAS drives. The company acknowledged this when we asked but it has not documented the use of SMR in the WD Red drives. This has left many users frustrated and speculating for the reason why the new drives are not working properly in their NAS set-ups. Since this article was first published Toshiba has also confirmed the undocumented use of SMR in some desktop hard drives.
[...] Seagate markets the Barracuda Compute drives as fast and dependable. Yet it is the nature of SMR drives that data rewrites can be slow.
When we asked Seagate about the Barracudas and the Desktop HDD using SMR technology, a spokesperson told us: "I confirm all four products listed use SMR technology."
In a follow-up question, we asked why isn't this information is not explicit in Seagate's brochures, data sheets and product manuals – as it is for Exos and Archive disk drives?
Seagate's spokesperson said: "We provide technical information consistent with the positioning and intended workload for each drive."
Western Digital is trying to redefine the word "RPM"
[...] new complaint is that Western Digital calls 7200RPM drives "5400 RPM Class"—and the drives' own firmware report 5400 RPM via the SMART interface.
[...] At first blush, this might seem like a non-issue—who wouldn't prefer a drive with a faster spindle speed? Unfortunately, faster spindles don't just mean potentially lower seek latency—they also come with a sharp increase in both noise generation and power consumption.
That increase in noise and power is what got many users on the trail of Western Digital's fake 5,400rpm spindle speed in the first place—those users purchased drives which they expected to roll low and slow, but they got more noise, heat, and power consumption than they expected.
[...] When we reached out to Western Digital in the course of researching this story, a representative confirmed the various forum-goers' and Redditor's conclusions—that is to say, "5400 RPM class" does not actually mean that a drive spins at 5,400rpm.
For select products, Western Digital has published RPM speed within a "class" or "performance class" for numerous years rather than publishing specific spindle speeds. We also fine-tune select hard drive platforms and the related HDD characteristics to create several different variations of such platforms to meet different market or application needs. By doing so, we are able to leverage our economies of scale and pass along those savings to our customers. As with every Western Digital product, our product details, which include power, acoustics and performance (data transfer rate), are tested to meet the specifications provided on the product's data sheet and marketing collateral.
RPM means revolutions (or rotations) per minute, in some circles.
I detect another class action lawsuit forming. Save your receipts.
Previously: Seagate Caught Using SMR in Barracuda Compute and Desktop Drives
Western Digital Shingled Out in Class Action Lawsuit
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @02:08PM (5 children)
Even though the customers will in the end get nothing, maybe the suit will convince them not to pull this stunt again.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @06:13PM
That's the point of class action suits. The point isn't to make the injured parties whole, it's to punish the company for engaging in the behavior. If you did try to file the claim in small claims court, you'd likely pay more in airfare than you could ever hope to recoup. But, with the class action suit, at least the company gets punished and you might even get something out of it.
The real problem tends to be that the damages wind up being capped or the item offered the members of the class is useless. Free credit monitoring is "great," but if you've already got it it's worthless. And the courts don't always require enough of the money be set aside to actually address the scope of the problem.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday May 30 2020, @07:02PM (1 child)
Any more, I don't feel too trusting of spinning rust or the remaining manufacturers. In recent years. have had hard drives fail on me far more often than they ever did in the past. Yay, they can hold 2T. Buy at least 2, preferably 3, and RAID them, in hopes that will be enough to prevent data loss.
I figure that the reduced competition has the remaining manufacturers racing to the bottom, cheapening hard drives every way they can.
I don't know how reliable SSD is, but so far, they seem excellent.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday May 30 2020, @08:28PM
Yeah, I think I'm switching to SSDs for bulk. I might get a 2 TB if it drops to $100.
Ultimately, we need a better replacement for bulk. Something like this [wikipedia.org], but ideally it should be rewritable.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by chewbacon on Saturday May 30 2020, @10:59PM (1 child)
I have some of these drives and I'd at least like them replaced with what I was lead to believe I was getting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 01 2020, @12:20AM
I have a more than reasonable suspicion that my NAS contains WD Red drives. One thing for USA lawsuits, etc - but totally another matter outside the US, like NZ where our IT comes down mostly through ONE CN-owned channel. Good luck getting any new / replacement drives from those thieves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @02:16PM (8 children)
I had to do a bit of digging to first understand what SMR is, then I still don't know if I really understand what the nefarious problem is. Is it that they are illegally misleading consumers?
(Score: 2, Informative) by RandomFactor on Saturday May 30 2020, @02:43PM (1 child)
Mostly write performance based from what I can figure.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @01:44AM
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....
(Score: 3, Informative) by epitaxial on Saturday May 30 2020, @03:23PM (5 children)
People are buying "NAS" drives and putting them in large complex storage pools. What they really want for that application are enterprise grade drives. These particular drives have slow write speeds in certain situations (like a ZFS pool) and become slow, the controller thinks the drive has stopped responding and removes it from the pool. If the controller removes several drives it could be disastrous.
These NAS drives are labeled correctly. A box with a few mirrored drives. No one is buying drives as small as 4TB for big data.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @04:22PM (3 children)
No, enterprise grade drives are not required for this application. What is desired is ordinary consumer grade dtives, which these are not. SMR drives have the read performance of regular drives, but write properties that are closer to tape. The only thing they're really good for is bulk data storage, such as backups or media libraries.
Drives that fail when subjected to ordinary real world use are not fit for purpose. While SMR drives might be suitable for some applications, they're definitely not suitable for all, or even most applications, and these companies have simply decided to sell substandard, limited - application drives as general purpose without disclosing what they are. It's at best a deceptive marketing practice, but what's really needed is a recall, like when Intel's pentium FPU didn't work.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Sunday May 31 2020, @12:50AM
The drives aren't failing. The controller thinks they failed because the speeds were too slow.
(Score: 1) by leon_the_cat on Sunday May 31 2020, @09:13AM
They have nearly the same speed for sequential write. Its many random writes that can cause them to slow to a crawl
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday May 31 2020, @11:04PM
In agreement with the other responses, and I pretty much hate the whole SMR concept in that the controller has to go back and re-write tracks, hence the big delays.
That said, it's conceivable that a RAID controller could be designed to take SMR write delay issues into account and compensate, or at least tolerate it.
But that said, SMR drive performance is gonna suck. They were originally conceived for storing long-term somewhat slow data, like any kind of telemetry / datalogging, security camera recording (but not many cameras on 1 drive), storage of backups, etc. You might tolerate one in a PC / laptop if it's an auxiliary drive, not your main boot / OS work drive.
(Score: 3, Informative) by nyebi on Sunday May 31 2020, @08:33AM
The real problem is that manufacturers in the past clearly marketed the cheaper SMR drives as archive storage because of the associated performance issues. But now they silently slipped that technology into a product line that people mostly buy for applications that will massively suffer from said performance degradation.
And it's not just they no longer prominently featured in the data sheets that a drive is SMR, they went as far as not answering direct customer questions about the topic, stating that the technology they use in their products is not the customer's business.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Saturday May 30 2020, @02:39PM
Visual: https://jon.severinsson.net/lwn/smr_track_layout.png [severinsson.net]
Discussion: https://lwn.net/Articles/591782/ [lwn.net]
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(Score: 4, Informative) by RandomFactor on Saturday May 30 2020, @02:47PM
+1 Article Title
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