Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

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From the blog:

"The data intensity of typical small business/home NAS workloads is intermittent, leaving sufficient idle time for DMSMR drives to perform background data management tasks as needed and continue an optimal performance experience for users."

A NAS drive, which features RAID specific firmware no less, is _very_ likely to be put in a RAID, and rebuilding the RAID after replacing a disk is exactly the opposite of an intermittent workload.

What they should have done is this:

- Change the name slightly, "WD Red Lite" or something.

- Make sure the product information page (and firmware if applicable) says this is a DM-SMR drive.

- Say it is intended for single-disk or RAID-1 (mirror) setups, and is not recommended in RAID-5, RAID-6 or similar setups, with links to their Red Pro disks for that.

That would allowed them to capitalize on the "WD Red" name as something consumers have heard about, while also not right out lying about a very important aspect of the product.

If you change the name to "lite" the jig is up and everyone knows it's a poorer quality product than what they're used to buying. By keeping the same name they can increase margins by duping unsuspecting buyers into buying a poorer quality product.

Maybe "Red Lite" is a poor name, maybe "Red Home" is better.

Either way yeah this was an attempt at a cash grab. Which was quite stupid, because there's no way they'd be able to hide the fact that it's SMR for long, the performance characteristics is just too different.

But it's also totally unnecessary, because SMR is perfectly fine for use-cases with sparse random write workloads. Something most casual home users or small businesses with a 1 or 2 disk Synology or similar has.

They already created Red Pro for business use, and market it as "Designed and tested for RAID environments 8-16 Bay NAS", at a 37% markup relative to the Red in my market. My quick Google sleuth indicates those are not SMR. The Red line is marketed as "Designed and tested for RAID environments 1-8 Bay NAS", which implies they're for more than just a 2-bay Synology box.

An Ethical company, with Ethical Marketing would do that

WD has proven they are anything but ethical with this move, I moved from Seagate to WD awhile back for many of my personal drives, looks like it is time to move back to Seagate or Toshiba from now on..

Both Seagate and Toshiba do the same. You have nowhere to move.

Kinda... They do sell undisclosed SMR drives into the Desktop and external Space, but they both have come out to Affirm that they do not do that in the NAS space

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seaga...

Seagate will happily brick your drives with bad firmware. Toshiba is it.

I dropped WD after buying, and returning, their WD MyCloud Home device.

I expected, per their advertisements, a cheap barebones LAN visible NAS with SMB shares.

What i got was basically a self hosted google drive that: - doesn't work without internet even on LAN - can be accessed as SMB share only with WD spyware installed! - WD spyware crashed my graphics drivers - WD spyware works only when there is internet connection available - can be only managed via internet - costs more than space on any cloud storage provider for self hosted solution - you have utter lack of privacy as they scan, and analyze each file on your drive as per their ToS, same thing with their application - hence i call it spyware.

Yah, the idea that someone at WD thought it a good idea to put these kinds of drive in a RAID means that they don't technically understand RAID. Which is sort of scary, and makes you wonder what other gocha's they have lying about.

Even regular idle scrubbing is going to potentially keep drives 100% busy for extended periods of time. Combined with online backup/etc. Its crazy! Do they think that only enterprises run their NAS'es with backup, or workloads that provide a low level of near constant background activity?

Doesn't seem like it would work in a RAID1 setup: a rebuild typically requires reading the entire source drive and writing it to the other drive in the mirror. Some filesystems like ZFS might understand where the used blocks are and only copy them, but others where RAID is a layer above the filesystem (Linux mdadm) will have to copy the whole drive, even if it's empty.

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