TechyBen

So, I found the videos and watched them and the data doesn't really show anything in defense for SMR's being "NAS" grade.  He got his maths wrong, and he never truly did a test of CMR vs SMR drives (just varying degrees of amount of SMR drives).
 
10hours 40 min (640 minutes) [CMR drives with single SMR]
18 hours 2 min (1082 minutes) [All SMR drives]
 
The statement in the videos is 59.15% slower, that is incorrect [Correct math is (1082-640)/640 = 69.1%].  8 hours is a considerable difference in rebuild times, and trust me it would make a difference in my purchases if I knew a rebuilt would take 8 hours longer on an normally 11 hour rebuild.
 
The next issue is the testing methodology.  With STH, they used the same NAS, swapped the drives, and emulated real world conditions of data being written while resilvering (I like this methodology).  In the NASCompares video, it was different NAS, they only ever did swap the AX drives, and they put 0 load on it.  In the real world, if you had to rebuild the 8 hours of differences makes a world of difference (in any workplace environment)...if they used the drives while rebuilding (a likely scenario since a business can't shut down to have it rebuild); then that 8 hours would likely balloon a lot more with SMR drives (since the cache would be used up, and since it no longer is writing sequentially it will likely suffer a lot more)
 
Less than 24 hours in an ideal rebuild scenario, see above
 
It isn't about engineering a result, it all comes down to the fact that WD didn't including any indication that they silently switched to a technology that would have an impact on a metric that is important.  If you see my other posts before, I have talked about how SMR has it's perks, but in a NAS advertised drive it should be in the specs; ontop of which they keep the product name the same.
 
And yes, 8 hours differences can make a world of difference in real world rebuild cases.

That's a middling chance - which is to say you don't see it as a strong case.
 
You also called the people bringing forth the case:
And identified with the position that ZFS could be the problem by sneering at the plaintiffs:
... and implying they're arrogantly behaving as if:
 
Those aren't impartial statements.
 
But in all of this, I think it seems as though you took my presentation of Torvalds 'don't break the userspace' commentary as a personal jab at you and assumed things about what I was saying, when what I meant by it is simply a counter to the presented argument of 'the odd-one-out is the problem, rather than the change which created the odd-one-out'.
 
I think this has been blown out of proportion. My post featuring Linus Torvalds' commentary is adding additional perspective to a line of thought presented in this thread's discussion, and is not saying something about you or other people for presenting or exploring that line of thought.

I've also heard people claim the actual problem with vaccines was one single incident of an error with a vaccine having deadly (to children) chemicals in it*. Thus the "this one specific instance of one specific risk factor" became "I'm gonna go crazy".
 
I can totally understand and be behind someone's personal decision on medical grounds. Even if they decide to not take treatment (I'm very against forcing people to do things, up to the point we have to defend ourselves, and even then, sometimes the best thing is to walk away and let them learn from their mistake if possible). So deciding not to risk a vaccine being contaminated (the "I'll never drive ever and thus never have a car accident thinking) seems at least partially a reasonable decision. However, most don't make the decision that way, and base it off wrong and incorrect information and understanding.
 
* I've not searched for that specific example, at the time I did not note the date/place they were talking about, but examples such as [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylene_glycol#1937_–_The_Massengill_Incident_(United_States) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_sulfanilamide ] show it *does* happen at times. IIRC in that case, the recall was made "Oh, please take them off the shelves when you get a chance, probably prescribe less..." while it had a near instant death sentence for any children taking it! Sadly, scary events like that (being told to give poison the Dr knows will kill your child to them!!!) will scare, scar and mess up people.  

I had to check one of these out last year, as it was left in the shed and had rusted (not even the case worth salvaging ) 

 
AND it is heavier than it looks.

This is why I deffer all updates forever, until I decide.
 
"Customers won't install updates if we let them choose
"Customers won't install updates if we don't let them choose".
 
Law of unintended consiquences.

Where am I afraid of better understanding? Someone got an SMR drive, 2 of them failed building an array/raid. They replaced them with PMR drives (of the similar manufacture/design) and it built/did not fail. Thus they requested PMR drives for their arrays/raid/nas.
 
Yes somehow, that's wrong? I'm wrong for agreeing with them that it would have been easier if they'd been told SMR/PMR so they could match up their raids.
 
You know, like tires, bulbs, etc etc. "Materially identical" in marketing/engineering speak, 99% of the time is not the same.

who forgot to test? I feel like that is true too.
I assume it is going badly for WD, given they are based about 20 miles from me and are likely having most people working from home.
yeah pressure from big OEMs does that.

It IS important to some, and those want to know. 
 
People don't initially care about knowing whether it's SMR, they want to know the performance. Since manufacturers don't want to give read/write perfromance numbers, then at least tell us if it's SMR since then we can know performance will be massively lower if it's inappropriate for the use case.
 
The other stuff you mention will probably have some small impacts on pertormance. SMR can have HUGE impact, bringing down a drive to having write performance lower than any CMR HDD that's existed in 15 years.
 
Do you expect this read/write difference out of a 2-drive RAID0?
 

 
(Yes is not a valid answer.)

That's what you've been doing since the start of this thread though? 
 
It's an array that would have had close to the same read and write performance if the drives weren't SMR, but since they are there's a difference factor of 3. 

Not a fan of SMR drives if they die after 2 years

Because *you* don't see a problem means there isn't a problem?  Or does it mean you can't see all that well?  hmmmm....

They should encoded with a fixed character in the model number. Given 0-z can hold 36 different meanings they can easily encode. HAMMR vs PMR vs SMR. It should also be on the spec sheet. 
 
platters should be listed as well on the data sheet 
 
this is some sort of firmware not related to the drive type however the drive type should be listed. 

Edit: I’ll add on standardize character by brand or in a perfect world everyone agrees. 
example 
0 PMR
1 SMR
3 PMR helium field. 

I'm thinking this might (in theory) change the dynamic of density to performance ratio. The more layers you have, the greater the possibility of thermal throttling from heat-soaking an area of the chip. The heat has to go. More layers = more insulative properties, no? Meaning, you can get SSDs down on a cost per GB, but that could also reduce the throughput per chip too. But if we're talking about needing pure performance, I'm sure those drives will be specced out with multiple chips in parallel. For the latest mobile phone, it's a non-issue.

I think my 4TB Seagate drive is the one on the list. 
 
I have not noticed it being slower vs other drives I have had as they were all pretty old.
 
I also have it in a read heavy/write light application. All the writes are large and very infrequent. So therefore slowness is expected and planned for.
 
I suspect this is probably how it was expected, it without impact on experience with a gain to the user on par with the loss (apple phone slowdown anyone?).
 
There are some of course who are in a different boat, they purchased the drive for a different application compared to those who boot and run mostly from SSDs. Those people should rightly feel aggravated by this news, even if most of us are just angry for the subterfuge rather than any real world harm.

I wouldn't say "nobody". I never would use 5400 rpm drives in a desktop computer (I did use them for backup drives, though). Back when I was still using HDDs, I had no trouble getting 7200 rpm WD Blacks, even 7200 rpm 2.5" Blacks, but I had to order them online (usually from Newegg) since I couldn't get them locally, despite living in a megalopolis.
 
I have to pretty much buy everything I need for my computers online since shopping in the Phoenix Metro area is like shopping in BF, Outer Mongolia. It's why I keep a spare of every kind of drive I use on hand so, if one dies, I can get back up and running right away with the spare and have more time to replace the spare, especially since sometimes they are out of stock everywhere.

Because typically most HDD lines will go through dozens of revisions with slightly different model numbers but the same performance and reliability. The general expectation is that if something significant changes, it would either be introduced as a new line or it would be a bigger rebrand of an existing line. At the absolute minimum it should be added to the specs list on all of the big etailer's product listing. 
 
I don't understand all of the people arguing in favor of the company's doing this. Is it a life ruining bit of false/misleading marketing? No, but why would you ever not want the end consumer to have more information? I don't see anyone in either of the two threads on this topic arguing that they shouldn't sell SMR drives, just put it on the damn box so the more informed consumers actually know what they're buying. 

or given how long model numbers are just add a character that represents that so we don't have to go digging through product information sheets. have it fixed across an entire company.
 
Basically all this says to me is if you actually care about performance and don't want to get BS in the desktop space grab the black, X300, barracuda pro. I hate digging through product sheets

Checking if the drive is 7200RPM vs 5400RPM and how many years warranty it has compared to the weight of the drive and how much cache it has is not intuitive and not something the consumer should have to know or do to be able to determine if it's SMR. It's pretty obvious by this news that most people weren't aware of what they were buying. The blame for that falls squarely on the manufacturers for failing to provide the information to consumers.
 
Just include the information in the spec sheet. List if the drive is SMR or PMR. Most people won't care and will continue to make their purchasing decision based on price, but those that do care will be able to make an informed buying decision and can consider buying a different model if PMR is important to them.

If you're using a single drive it doesn't even matter. Problem was with RAID arrays because the drive behaved differently than the rest and that caused a problem.

I'm pretty sure part of the problem was SMR exactly. When command came in from RAID array to do something, all the other drives were "alright, lets rock on" and SMR drive was like "holup guys, I got to shuffle this shit around"  and then whole thing just shit itself because it's expected that same drives would behave the same at the same time...

My ST2000DM001 uses SMR, and it is just fine in RAID0 with with an ST2000DM006. What I'd be more worried about is having to go into a datasheet to find the cache amount and RPM of a HDD, instead of seeing it clearly on the specifications page. That drive btw came from an external drive (it was hitting over 65oC - enclosure was quite terrible) which has just shy of 1000 days powered on.
 
Next drive I'm going to be getting though is one targeted at NAS usage, due to the number of HDD in my system (though the other 3.5" is only a 5400RPM F3 - low vibrations from it).

Don't forget 3.5", PCIe AIC, Mini PCIe, and my personal favorite EDSFF (better known as the "Ruler" SSD or E1.L). Also, M.2 is a connector form factor that allows NVMe as well as AHCI over the PCIe bus and is commonly used for things such as  WiFi, Bluetooth, satellite navigation, NFC, WWAN and many others. It is also used as a USB and SATA bus connector.
 
Note: You probably honestly already know this, as you are extremely active on the forum, so it's more for the less knowledgeable people that are perusing about and come across this.

Unraid seems to have less of an issue with SMR than a standard Raid, Provided the Parity drives are CMR.
At least with Unraid and the Data drives only needing to be accessed for the data on them the drive has idle time to rewrite the tracks.
I did have 4 SMR drives in my Synology NAS and they always had latency issues, others reported the drives dropping out.
 
 

That's for the 2.5" drives.
It was an itsie bitsie teenie weenie yellow polka dot hard drive

Even though I am extreme example of those who have gone all SSD, I agree that solution isn't practical for everyone.