"Trust and reliability are the foundation of everything we do at Western Digital," reads WD's official response to German outlet Heise Online. As WD alludes to, multiple data recovery scientists, including 030 data recovery, have begun reporting the issues fundamental to WD's use of SMR technology. An open secret since 2021, data scientists have known that these 2TB to 6TB WD Red and Blue SMR drives have increased chances of failure, up to permanent data loss and physical damage.SMR drives have been an available technology for hard drive makers to increase capacity cheaply at the cost of performance for years. SMR drives "shingle" data written onto them, by overlaying the write tracks of data on top of other data. While this results in up to 25% greater capacity per platter, it also adds layers of complexity and failure, as rewriting write tracks shingled under neighboring data becomes a whole production. Now, data recovery scientists are confirming that WD Blue and Red drives with the WD*0EZAZ, WD*0EDAZ, and WD*0EFAX models at the 2-6TB sizes are prone to abnormally high failure rates. The EZAZ, EDAZ, and EFAX drive models have been trouble for WD many times before. When the drives were released in 2020, WD did not disclose to consumers that the drives utilize SMR technology, a serious omission. While the company issued an apology for its blunder, a class-action lawsuit launched in 2021 secured a $2.7 million compensation fund for hoodwinked WD customers.Now, these same problematic drives are also proving to be at risk of serious damage and data loss. Anyone using WD hard drives at these sizes from 2020 or later should check their hardware to ensure they are not also at risk of data loss and failure.
>>107060768Not really news, everyone knows SMR drives are defective. If you are affected this, it's because you knowingly bought a garbage drive.
>>107060768>Trust and reliability are the foundation of everything we do at Western Digitallyl
>>107060934>knowinglyeh they did try a lot to hide smrs at first tho
>>107060768>2TB to 6TB WD Reduhhh I have some 4TB WD RedsRed Pro or whatever They better not be SMR
>>107061344you need to gurgle the model id string right now
>>107060934>When the drives were released in 2020, WD did not disclose to consumers that the drives utilize SMR technology
>>107060768i have an EZ model running strong for 5 years now. It handled being rammed by the os and chink enclosure with random sleeps, it handled power loss, it handled months uppn mounths of continuous operation. now its running in my zfs pool. >zfs status -v>scrubbed 0 bytesi think its all good man
>>107060768That's what sie geht for using SMR.
>>107060768What about the 8GB ones anon?
>>107061344It's called Red Plus, I have one too
>>107062475That specific model number should be the original helium version which is CMR. Newer ones may be SMR, though. They fucked this up; should've clearly disclosed which drives are CMR and which SMR. Same with other manufacturers. Same with SSD manufacturers, actually, and their CIA-level faggotry where they avoid telling people when drives are QLC and whether they are using HBM, DRAM or just rawdogging that NAND flash. I would call them Jews but unfortunately the Jews have more morals and are significantly more upstanding than these watermelon sellers.
>>107060768SMR is truly the gift that keeps on giving. Good thing HDDs left the consumer space years ago, businesses and prosumers are much better prepared to navigate this shitshow than ordinary folks.
>>107062598I cant be the only one with a video collection that requires HDD's for cost effectiveness.
>>107062661No, you are not. I have approx 100TB raw space for that.
>>107062680All my movies fit on a 12TB drive. I just have an 8TB for TV/misc and another 8TB for "other" video.Then again I lost my passion for movies over a decade ago and havent really watched or downloaded any new ones in that time =/
what's the point of hdds now? big ssd sizes are getting cheaper desu
>>107062661You are notBut you are not a large number And if you need the space you just have to suck it up and buy the overpriced drives or try your luck still spending quite a bit on used DC ones
>>107060768Lol, but WD is STILL lying about their product specs, their newer Red Plus/Purple models are also hidden SMR that belong to VeniceRP family (you can compare them visually to SMR Red EFAX models and see no difference) , even the new HGST-based AvalonRP 8TB drives with 4 platters are hidden SMR. Why won't they launch a investigation that would reveal this fact as well.>>107062475Your model is no longer produced, it's a genuine CMR with five 1,67tb platters, but the newer Red Plus model WD80EFPX is a hidden SMR that belongs to AvalonRP family.>>107062528>Newer ones may be SMR, though. They fucked this up; should've clearly disclosed which drives are CMR and which SMR. Same with other manufacturers.They are indeed SMR but slightly improved and better concealed (they removed trim and the 189th second layer translator module which make the drives behave like CMR during linear writes but during random small block writes the speed still drops to 40mb/s when running out of cache, which is a slight improvement over barracuda SMRs which drop their speeds to 25mb/s during heavy loads to prevent buffer overfill.)They won't. They're bunch of kikes, they will double down as always to reduce costs. Expect all hdds becoming SMR, except for some large capacity helium drives.
>>107062598Fucking normies
>>107060768https://web.archive.org/web/20251031124840/https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/wd-launches-investigation-into-problems-with-its-smr-hard-drives-the-same-drives-that-got-wd-sued-in-2021-now-reporting-failure-rates-due-to-fundamental-flawslink to the article
>>107060768Does this mean the HDD /g/ schizo was right? He made like 5 threads about this that reached 300 replies every month for the past 5 months.
>>107065155not exactly these are still the same dogshit hard drives from 5 years ago that got WD in trouble
>>107065155No, they aren't giving any kind of statistic like Backblaze, it's all turd-news as marketing/promote some lawsuit.They should post the stats at minimum.All their statements are useless to discern the severity of the question, ie they can claim the same for these 2 situations:>0.00002% more likely to loss data >15400% more likely to loss data
>2tb HDDs went up from 60bux to 80bux in my shitholeKILL ME
>>107065225>2tb hdd in 2025you'll never stop being poor if you keep throwing your money away
>>107060768so EFRX are fine? asking for a friend
>>107065298backing up 16TB giganiggadrives looks scary
So why only small drives are smr? Can't they just make a 16tb smr so I can stuff 24tb on it?Can't do it on drives with many platters for some reason?
>EZRZ>PURZ>EFPX>EFRXhow fucked am I?
>>107065729>>107066221EFRX are old Red drives with 1-1.2TB data density and 64mb cache, they're good old CMR based on Greens.Early 10-60PURZ with 64mb cache and 82-84PURZ are good as well. EZRZ are old Blue CMR drives with 64mb cache. All these 3 models are no longer produced.New PURZ, EFPX, EZAX models with 2TB density are hidden SMR.
>>107060768MFW my RAID is made of WD*0EFPX drives
>>107066326>models with 2TB densityhow do I check?
>>107066425https://rml527.blogspot.com/
>>107066465it's in the "2.0TB/platter Section"but if it doesn't list "Shingled Magnetic Recording"in the name, am I still good?or are these official specs and lies
>>107066597These are lies. I asked several data recovery specialists about these models being smr and they confirmed it via tests and firmware analysis.
I have an WD40EZAZ-00SF3B0 4TB with 18k hours on it, 1500 power ons. Haven't had issues with it.
do not reply to psycho HDD schizo
>>107060768SMRschizo absolutely redeemed wd shills terminally BTFO'd seagatecucks stay cucked
>>107062952>All my movies fit on a 12TB drive.You either don't have many movies or you download them in 720p dvd5 size.Then again, I have nearly 500 DVDs and Laserdiscs, three 5 channel speaker sets, a plasma tv, a projector, and a NAS for all HD content.
>>107065155>Does this mean the HDD /g/ schizo was right?No, he was blathering about WD being jews because he can no longer buy $15 CMR 2.5" drives.Every helium enterprise drive is still CMR. The only thing that happened was that shit drives got shitter. This is like bitching about QLC drives sucking ass or Radeons having driver bugs. You don't like it, then don't buy junk.
>>107066831welp
