JSaville

Here's a blog post from Western Digital addressing the issue. https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/?amp

That drive is fine, it's only the newer efax that has SMR.

It's red efax variant drives from 2 - 6TB, so 3 & 4TB are included in this issue. If you have the older efrx series then you're fine. I'm running 2 x 6TB efrx currently and they've been faultless.

Unless the manufacturer specifies that a drive isn't SMR (and isn't lying about it) we won't necessarily be able to find out, as mentioned in the articles the drives don't immediately present as being SMR in most software. More information on why SMR is not great here. https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/shingled-drives-have-non-shingled-zones-for-caching-writes/

Linus explaining Shingled Magnetic Recording on WAN show should cover it nicely. https://youtu.be/8IRjFZ9xEj8

Aha, thanks for that. Sorted!

Oops, sorry about that, obviously didn't read the guidelines enough... Hope that I've done enough!

I thought so too, made me angry enough to actually set up an account to post this!

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.tomshardware.com/amp/news/wd-fesses-up-some-red-hdds-use-slow-smr-tech https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shingled-magnetic-recording/ Western Digital have confirmed that they are using DM-SMR (Drive Managed Shingled Magnetic Recording) in their 2 - 6TB Red NAS HDDs, which is significantly slower in write performance than CMR drives. This method is usually reserved for use in datacentre drives, where random read/write is not a common occurrence. Users have reported that these drives tend to take significantly longer to re-silver in a raid environment and often fail to do so, not only in ZFS applications but also traditional RAID. I feel that if you're marketing a HDD as 'NAS ready' then it should work correctly in a NAS RAID environment, and as a long term user of Western Digital I'm very disappointed and concerned in the direction that they have chosen to take. More information in the links provided above. Edit: more information detailing what SMR is and why it's not great here: https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/shingled-drives-have-non-shingled-zones-for-caching-writes/ Edit 2: a blog post from Western Digital - buy the more expensive drives https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/?amp