Why are Drive Manufacturers in BIG TROUBLE?

on may 29 2020 haddis law filed a class action lawsuit against western digital accusing the company of secretly selling hard drives built with smr technology and no the problem wasn't that these hard drives were whispering neck tingling sweet nothings into their users ears it's that smr not only makes the drive slower but in some cases completely unusable for their marketed purpose here's the thing even though judge judy is everything i aspire to be normally we don't delve into companies getting sued on this channel but for this lawsuit i'm making exception for two reasons one because patrick from serve the home asked me to and he's just a super nice guy and two because the reasons that this whole thing is happening and what it means for the industry and for you are super interesting and super techy and today's video was brought to you by glasswire keep track of the weird stuff that's connecting to your pc even when you aren't using it with glasswire you can see if a strange device joins your wi-fi and block it instantly get 25 off today using codelinus at the link below [Music] smr stands for shingled magnetic recording and it's a relatively new technology in the world of hard drives having just entered the market in 2014. now as you may know inside a hard drive are magnetic actuator arms that read and write data to a set of spinning platters now in perpendicular magnetic recording or pmr which is also known as conventional magnetic recording or cmr those platters have single tracks laid out side by side this makes each track easy to access by the read and right arms but capacity is limited to how many tracks you can squeeze next to each other on a single platter in shingled magnetic recording or smr platters are made up of chunks of overlapping tracks kind of like the shingles on a roof this technique allows more tracks to fit onto a single platter increasing capacity but it comes at a cost you see each time a new track is written it overlaps part of a previously written track which must then also be rewritten i mean it sounds kind of insane doesn't it i mean imagine a word processor where every time you wanted to change a word in a paragraph you had to go back and rewrite the rest of the paragraph along with your changes terrible i i mean that experience not ltteststore.com ltdstore.com is great great products but anyway for hard drives this approach is actually very sane you see ssds kind of have the whole speed thing on lock these days so most hard drive innovation over the last few years has been pretty focused on capacity and shingle magnetic recording allows drive manufacturers to exchange a bit of performance for as much as 25 to 50 percent higher capacity per platter that means either greater capacities or fewer platters for a given capacity lowering the total cost so then that's problem number one really hard drive manufacturers selling a cheaper product without labeling it as such but why are people so upset well you see it's not just that smr drives have slower performance it's that to work properly they need special firmware or software that can navigate through all of these overlapping tracks so there are three different varieties of smr in host managed smr the host computer must give special commands to the drive if the drive doesn't receive these commands it simply will not work these kinds of drives are most commonly used in cloud servers owned by you know amazon or google where vast quantities of drives must be controlled the second type host aware smr allows the drive to respond to these special commands or to regular commands so you don't necessarily need special software to use that second type but it certainly helps the third type of smr is where things get messy in device managed smr the drive doesn't require special commands and in fact it shows up in your pc as a completely normal drive most of the time this isn't catastrophic in fact this type of smr drive usually has a cmr cache which can be written more quickly for a short period masking that slower write performance this approach is actually very similar to how many slower qlc ssds use a high speed slc cache as we discussed in this video right here so the idea is that when you write some data to the drive it goes into the higher speed cache and your file transfer is complete your data is safe but then 20 minutes 30 minutes later you might actually still hear the drive thrashing away as it dumps the data out of the cache onto the slower shingled portion for most home users honestly that's probably fine and they might even be happy with the trade-off for more capacity on the cheap but using a device-managed smr drive when you don't know that it's an smr drive can be catastrophic as our good buddy patrick found out he and his team tested cmr drives from hgst and seagate against two drives from wd's red lineup which is marketed specifically for network attached storage systems only one small problem without clear markings one of them was built with cmr and the other was built with smr as expected they found that the smr drive was slower in almost every typical storage benchmark which was bad then it got worse the kicker was the freenas raid z rebuild now raid is designed to protect your data through redundant copies in the event of a physical drive failure so the test involves wiping one of the drives in a raid array intentionally and then tasking the system with rebuilding all the data that was supposed to be on it the cmr drives all took over 16 hours which is already a long time to be worried that your data is in this vulnerable state where if another drive dies it could all be lost but it is normal for this process to take a while as for the smr drive it took nine and a half days what now patrick and co naturally thought something must be wrong with their test setup so they ran the test again and got a similar result ours technica also ran some tests finding that in a random write latency test the wd red smr drive could take as long as 1.3 seconds to save a meg of data compared to 0.1 seconds on the seagate cmr drive now we need to mention that servtohome's test server ran on freenas a popular open source operating system for network attached storage and while smr drives have clearly been operating without disastrous consequences on other types of servers freenas uses the zfs file system which can also be found in a ton of other software from ubuntu and proxmox to nas systems from qnap and apparently zfs according to patrick's tests does not play nicely with shingle magnetic recording now there's some indication that smr might cause problems for other file systems too since synology has listed wd's smr drives as incompatible with a huge swath of their nas systems but we don't have the specifics on those ones anyway all of this would have been fine if customers were educated properly so they didn't accidentally end up with smr drives except as we said before wd didn't label their smr drives the only indication that a given drive was smr or cmr was a single letter in the model number and because these drives are device managed the end user wouldn't even realize what they had purchased when they plugged it into their system now to be fair to wd seagate and toshiba also sold unlabeled smr drives but just not in their nas product lines so it was far more unlikely that those drives would lead to the type of unusable performance seen in patrick's tests and the good news is that all three vendors have now committed to labeling the recording technology used in their products and to wd's credit they seem to be responding well to customers requesting cmr replacements for their smr drives meaning that the only lingering question after all this is why how exactly did western digital a titan of the storage industry for 50 years miss the fact that smr drives are completely inappropriate for zfs a perfectly common file system for nasa's and then market these drives for nas use a question that is made all the more confusing by this video from 2015 showing an engineer from hgst a company owned by western digital explaining how dmsmr has tremendous compatibility problems with cfs and talking about how much work it would take to make them play nicely together wd clearly should have listened to manfred instead of evilly throwing their customers under the bus unless maybe something else happened here i don't think that this is some kind of evil masterminded plot to hurt nast users by western digital by any means i think that what's more likely is that this is just a communication breakdown and process breakdown between the different functional silos within western digital there's probably an element of this which is that each person has their own personal and departmental goals aligned to their function but not necessarily across their entire company and what that means is that those discussions don't happen to say hey should we even institute dmsmr into the space if we do what are the tests that we need to run to make sure that it works on all of our partner systems personally i like to think that best of people maybe to my detriment but haven't done management consulting in this space for years prior to doing sth i can totally see how this happens yeah okay i actually made a similar argument during the principled technologies benchmark scandal that intel went through a number of months ago and i think patrick is probably right here as well it's just still extremely embarrassing for them and the class action lawsuit is absolutely in our opinion both good and necessary because normal people who bought wd red smr drives may have faced a loss of time data and even livelihood that they wouldn't have if the product was properly labeled and honestly they deserve some compensation speaking of compensation massive shout out to drop.com for being our sponsor thanks guys the mass drop in sennheiser pc37x gaming headset features 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,063,963

Keywords: SMR, shingled magnetic recording, WD, Western digital, lawsuit, sue, sued, WD lawsuit, SMR lawsuit, performance, RAID, rebuild, hard drives, HDD, SMR hard drives, ServeTheHome, Ars Technica, Serve The Home

Id: aztTf2gI55k

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Malossi167]

Reguardless of your optinion about LTT this video is pretty important as many people will get this news and it will have at least a bit of an impact.

[u/panoply]

This video is good for me because I'm a noob data hoarder and I dont understand what the deal with SMR is.

[u/Neamow]

This is super important. I also mentioned this in a YouTube comment, but I was literally days away from buying two more WD drives for my NAS. The original ones are running out of space, but have been out of stock. I found the same brand and capacity, and thought it's the same, but thanks to this video saw that the old ones had the code WD60EFRX (CMR), while the new ones I was looking to buy had the code WD60EFAX (SMR).

This is so untransparent! There is nothing on the retailer's website, or the product packaging, images, etc, to indicate these drives were any different from each other. I would've unknowingly run into this issue were it not for this video.

[u/matiasandres]

I have a zfs array with 3 old WD purple WD30PURX. Does anyone know if they use SMR? I cant find any information on this old model.

[u/Proper_Road]

This is great he has a wide audience

[u/SonicMaze]

Every time i play one of his videos, my dogs go crazy from his high pitched voice. And it seems to get higher pitched with every video.

Also, I love that new glue-on facial hair he’s got going on.

[u/the_onionspeaks]

anyone got any information/links on shucked white labeled drives I have not been able to find any info anywhere,

[u/liam3]

so all 8tb drives are okay? curious they didnt use this capacity enhancing tech on larger capacity drives

[u/trisalias]

Does anyone know how I can check if this LaCie Mobile 4TB I just ordered is SMR or CMR? I don't see it on the site.

Or have good suggestions for CMR drives that are USB-C and good for MacBook Pros?