Western Digital's Red 2 - 6TB NAS drives apparently aren't good for NAS use?

leadeater · June 25, 2020

19 hours ago, Dellenn said:

new WD Red Plus drives with CMR tech

, this doesn't seem like the best approach but I guess it's a bit too late since there are already DM-SMR disks under the Red branding. Funny how they are calling it a new line when it's just the old revision being made again lol.

leadeater · June 25, 2020

11 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

The key being they are saying it is for lighter SOHO usage. That is significantly different from what Red's were marketed as before, which is a big deal.

WD Reds have always been essentially SOHO, when they were first introduced on to the market they were for 5 bay or lower NAS devices which is squarely SOHO, and also the low end of the SMB market too. Years later the recommendation got raised to 8 but nothing of the disks really changed it was more that people were already doing it and higher product line disks at the time were much more expensive so WD basically had to do it to stay competitive.

SOHO and SMB really are kind of meaningless terms because they are too broad and also too much overlap. SMB spans higher end 4 bay NAS's all the way up to 12 bay rackmount with Xeon CPUs, should be obvious to everyone the workload difference between the bottom end and top end of SMB.

One of the problems with HDDs, mainly in the past, is due to there being only one type all being made the same way using the same technology so the difference between the lowest end and highest end disks is not great, vibration compensation and RPM being the main differences but there is no fundamental difference between a 10K RPM disk and a 5400 RPM. This leads to people just using what ever regardless of recommendation or what the product was made for and nobody really ever had any problems, because why would you.

Even in flash/SSD people often ignore what a device is designed for and will put consumer TLC SSDs in NAS's and torture them to death with writes. Difference here is it has always been clear there are differences between SLC, MLC, TLC, and now QLC and that still doesn't stop people using SSDs for purposes not design for typically for cost reasons. Yes you can do this and it can work but it's at the users own risk and as long as you know it it's all fine. I use crap SSDs in my servers as cache/tiering devices and I've killed a fair amount of them, I don't even bother claiming warranty even if within it because even though I know I'd get away with it I am actually violating the terms, which aren't legal here but I'm not going to be a dick about something I knew was going to happen and playing a game of chance on purpose.

wanderingfool2 · June 25, 2020

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

WD Reds have always been essentially SOHO, when they were first introduced on to the market they were for 5 bay or lower NAS devices which is squarely SOHO, and also the low end of the SMB market too. Years later the recommendation got raised to 8 but nothing of the disks really changed it was more that people were already doing it and higher product line disks at the time were much more expensive so WD basically had to do it to stay competitive.

Lighter is a key word though and with the admission that drives need a larger degree of idle times.

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

Even in flash/SSD people often ignore what a device is designed for and will put consumer TLC SSDs in NAS's and torture them to death with writes. Difference here is it has always been clear there are differences between SLC, MLC, TLC, and now QLC and that still doesn't stop people using SSDs for purposes not design for typically for cost reasons.

That is the crux of the matter, that it wasn't disclosed (so choice was taken away) and the marketing remained the same (despite the fact the characteristics of the drives changed).

The fact is, even in the WD blog high/consistent writes favor CMR drives (which is why if you have streaming video cameras to the NAS, and expect to also use it as a regular NAS your performance tanks). I'll hold my complete judgement until pricing actually comes out, but it wouldn't surprise me at this point if Red Plus drives end up higher than Red CMR drives (before being replaced by SMR). It all seems as though WD is just trying to spin this, and companies should be held accountable when they try pulling the wool over peoples eyes (otherwise it really is a slippery slope)

leadeater · June 26, 2020

13 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Lighter is a key word though and with the admission that drives need a larger degree of idle times.

SOHO is lighter workloads with lots of idle time, in fact even when you go above SOHO to SMB NAS's still have large periods of idle time with only small bursts of load which could be as small as a few people saving a Word doc or Office auto save feature doing it in the background etc.

They aren't saying lighter than what WD Red was designed for before, it's just a factual statement that WD Reds are designed and targeted towards lighter workloads, namely lighter than what WD Red Pros are or the higher end product line than even that.

You're reading lighter as being less than before which is not the case, like I said WD Reds were actually always for this purpose but there was no real technology difference between HDDs on the market so the performance floor, the lowest possible, was too close to higher end products. When the bottom end of the scale is so close to the top end of the scale it's really hard to differentiate differences in products or even see a point in having them, which is how WD Reds end up in servers and NAS's with 24 bays because it legitimately works fine even if you're not supposed to and they were never intended for that usage. This is what made WD Reds so popular in the first place, the ability to do this which also means for WD many people are not buying more expensive products designed and intended for that, it's actually not illogical notion that in such a case a company would make the product worse because of this to better align and differentiate the product stacks. The only other option is to make those higher product tiers significantly better but that's currently impossible and also largely a fools errand due to SSDs.