Comment by washadjeffmad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by washadjeffmad | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

What damages, though? SMR drives are commonly used in enterprise storage applications.

WD should not have sold CMR and SMR drives under the same consumer label without distinction, but that's a marketing issue. The panic was instigated by self-appointed YouTube tech influencers who drummed up fear without bothering to show their followers how to make use of the drives.

The reality is that anyone can install ZFS and throw drives in a pool regardless of their characteristics and without adjusting a single sysctl tunable, then complain that they're not storage admins and shouldn't have been expected to manage their own systems. The moment they realized they didn't know as much as they thought they did, everything turned into hysterics.

I'd say $4-7/drive was totally worth paying to put this to rest.

One of the biggest issues here is that they flagrantly aimed to mislead the consumers.

They switched drives for an established line with dramatically different performance characteristics. They then proceeded to avoid declaring this, nor did they document this in a publicly available manner, requiring external independent investigation.

This is not for enterprise drives either, this is for consumer nas drives and they're marketed as such. It's pretty absurd to change an established line of products in such a manner that it no longer functions similarly in its original use case, while continuing to advertise it for that same case with absolutely 0 disclosure.

Hell, when questioned about it, they avoided providing information on which drives were smr. In what world is "buy it and find out the specs for yourself" a reasonable standard of documentation?

So you are saying that you can tune SMR drives to behave like CMR with sysctl settings?

But QNAp / Synology won't do that? May be because WD was mixing SMR and CMR drives with the same product code, so consumers didn't know which drives they are getting in the first place and that's why the lawsuit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com