Question WD Blue 4TB EZAZ vs EZRZ?

[The Strange]

Hi guys, I need some serious help for this please:

Today I bought myself a WD Blue 4TB HDD (Brand New), When i back to home and checked the HDD specs written on it, I got shocked to see its "EZAZ" version, I have no idea about this "EZAZ", all I know that the WD Blue 4TB has only 1 version available "EZRZ", I started to think that its fake one as it was written "Made In Thailand" while Western Digital company is located in USA.
I just googled trying to know more about the EZAZ version, the info I found was saying its an SMR drive, have no idea what this means, but all i understand that its mostly used for storage only, and I need that HDD for both storage and gaming, mostly gaming more than storage.

So guys, Should I return it? I didn't open the box till now, also if you can give me more info about that EZAZ and EZRZ also.

Thanks in adavance.

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 minutes ago, The Strange said:

I started to think that its fake one as it was written "Made In Thailand" while Western Digital company is located in USA.

Tons of big companies make products in different countries than their headquarters. This hdd is legit. There really aren't many fake hdds as its so hard to make them, and only 3 companies make them now

 

7 minutes ago, The Strange said:

just googled trying to know more about the EZAZ version, the info I found was saying its an SMR drive, have no idea what this means, but all i understand that its mostly used for storage only, and I need that HDD for both storage and gaming, mostly gaming more than storage.

SMR means the write speeds are slower, esp for sustained random writes. Likely won't make a diffference here.

 

Id keep the drive, it will work fine and I think the EZAZ will replace the older EZRZ

[minibois]

1 minute ago, The Strange said:

I started to think that its fake one as it was written "Made In Thailand" while Western Digital company is located in USA.

WD is an American company, but manufacturing products in SEA is basically the norm nowadays. My WD Black drive from years ago also mentioned being manufactured in Thailand.

Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, China (of course) and more countries in that area are very common areas for electronics to be manufactured.

3 minutes ago, The Strange said:

the info I found was saying its an SMR drive, have no idea what this means, but all i understand that its mostly used for storage only, and I need that HDD for both storage and gaming, mostly gaming more than storage.

In short:

SMR = shingled magnetic recording

PMR/CMR = perpendicular/conventional mechanical recording

 

SMR drives don't suffer any read penalty, but random write operations will be a lot slower. SMR drives are not recommend for NAS (server) use nor for very random write-intensive applications. SMR allows the manufacturer to produce their hard drives for a lower price, but has the drawbacks as mentioned above.

This is a technology that has existed for a couple years, but has only fairly recently caught on as a term in the more mainstream tech world.

 

You can often tell if a drive will be SMR of CMR/PMR by the amount of cache is included in the drive.

While CMR/PMR drives have the common 32-64MB amount of cache, SMR drives often have 256MB (to compensate for their slower write-performance and needing to remember more temporary files).

 

Whether you're okay with an SMR drive is difficult to say, as there are many different types of workloads for drives.

If you truly want a high performance drive (in terms of speed), you might want to consider an SSD. If you want a higher performance HDD (but still not as high as a decent SSD), you can consider a 7200RPM CMR/PMR drive like the Toshiba X300 or WD Black.

Those are among the few CMR/PMR drives (that are not NAS drives specifically).

 

This video goes a bit in to detail about SMR, including some graphics to show what happens on the inside (and why random writes are often difficult for these drives):

This video was made, because it had come to light WD had been using SMR technology in their WD Red drives. Red drives are for NAS (server) use, which SMR technology does not work well with, which is why it was a controversial topic.

At that time, people became more aware of SMR vs. CMR/PMR (or at least I did).

[The Strange]

Thank you so so much guys for all this useful information, I'm really happy that I got some good knowledge about this topic, thanks to you again

 

47 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id keep the drive, it will work fine and I think the EZAZ will replace the older EZRZ

Unfortunately I will return it.

 

43 minutes ago, minibois said:

Whether you're okay with an SMR drive is difficult to say, as there are many different types of workloads for drives.

 

Actually I'm not OK at all with an SMR drive, as I will do so many write operations, like transferring files, Installation of games and apps which require a high write speed.

[Electronics Wizardy]

51 minutes ago, The Strange said:

Thank you so so much guys for all this useful information, I'm really happy that I got some good knowledge about this topic, thanks to you again

 

Unfortunately I will return it.

 

Actually I'm not OK at all with an SMR drive, as I will do so many write operations, like transferring files, Installation of games and apps which require a high write speed.

I have a SMR hdd I use for games, and it works fine. There is a large buffer so you don't see the smr performance impact for a while, and normally your internal is much slower than the hdd for game installs

[The Strange]

19 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

I have a SMR hdd I use for games, and it works fine. There is a large buffer so you don't see the smr performance impact for a while, and normally your internal is much slower than the hdd for game installs

As I understood, Gaming usually depends on read-operation only like Loading and so on, while the SMR HDDs problem are with write-operation, so yes, gaming will not be affected at all.

 

I will never return the HDD if I used it ONLY for gaming, but I'm doing too much write stuff as I mentioned above, that's the problem.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, The Strange said:

As I understood, Gaming usually depends on read-operation only like Loading and so on, while the SMR HDDs problem are with write-operation, so yes, gaming will not be affected at all.

 

I will never return the HDD if I used it ONLY for gaming, but I'm doing too much write stuff as I mentioned above, that's the problem.

What apps are you using? Normally sequential writes are fine, and if performance is a big issue, just get a ssd.

 

Also bigger hdd are normally faster, so id try to get a 8tb hdd as a replacement.

[chocolatekarma]

I know this is an old thread, but I found it while doing some research.  I own both an AZ (SMR) and RZ (CMR) WD Blue 4TB.  In my testing the AZ is a good deal faster, which I think is because its buffer is 4x larger.  The AZ has a 256MB buffer and the RZ only has 64MB.

 

Also, the AZ is much newer being released in 2021 and the RZ in 2015.

 

You can see the results here - the top is the AZ and the bottom is the RZ.

[kokosnh]

Yes, no, that’s not how we test HDD. 
land the speed is only for a moment, if the HDD have free space to clear… 

the read and write speeds, if on the same rpm, depends on the density of the data, and SMR will always have advantage here. 
 

and you tested the same HDD two times…