@@hkalisvaart mine is a 3.5" 3TB WD Red. I haven't noticed any slow downs, but still, it's awful to see that they don't market the product right. To be honest I'm coming from a 3TB WD Blue (that fried itself after 3 years). Well, time to try to refund this bitch.
@@st0rm617 st0rm The affected model numbers are listed here: www.hattislaw.com/cases/investigations/western-digital-lawsuit-for-shipping-slower-smr-hard-drives-including-wd-red-nas/
You keep saying things like "more capacity on the cheap" as if the drive manufacturers were instantly passing some portion of the savings along to consumers when switching to SMR... when no, at least in the short term they've often been pricing the SMR drives the same as the last non-SMR drives of the same capacity in the same same series.
yea thats the realy big problem I have with this. SMR is bad enough, the prices tough are the same or even going up now here in sweden on 2020 SMR editions of the same 2019 PMR editions.
Me: Phew, glad I went with Seagate for my nas Linus: Seagate and Toshiba also sold unlabeled smr drives Me: stops breathing Linus: just not in their nas lineup WHOOOO, MAN, WHAT A RIDE 😂
Yea they are all doing it, been a know fact for many months now. 2020 is the year all consumer drives went SMR (and some prosumer, looking at you WD Red)
How’s Seagate drives? Never used it for about 5 years never had a great experience with it other than a portable Seagate that’s 320gb about 10 years old still Super strong the rest Nas and barracudas all failed and with data losses. Toshiba N300 drives are awesome I have 20 x 14Tb drives running so far for 1 year now with 5 drives fail safe and also remotely duplicated and backed up to another 20 x 14 Tb HGST NAS drives which are Super expensive but Uber reliable. Hitachi drives are the only manufacturer that does not advertise but guarantee reliable. Seagate partnered with Synology and would alert you to failure what I would love to know is how’s the sound and also operations on full tilt and do you think they are better now in terms of reliability? My research always shows me 2 sides of the camp. Personally the iron wolf pro seems awesome to me since it’s cheapest of all the options.
I became aware of the issue a few months ago when I started to run out of space in my FilServer (NAS). I looked in to WD, Seagate and Toshiba and what I found was that basically ALL "consumer" drivers or to some extent prosumer drivers like WD Red now used SMR instead of PMR/CMR from 2020 and on. For example WD blue 6Tb, 2019 edition is PMR but if you get one from 2020 it will be SMR from what I could find out. Seagate and Toshiba have done the same with there "Desktop/Personal" driver series to. But what I find rely annoying except the fact that NONE of them are marketing there slow crappy SMR drives as SMR, is the fact that the price seems unchanged at least here in Sweden theirs no better deal to be had on the 2020 models compared to the 2019 models. Like Linus sad, manufactures can get 25-50% more density out of the platters with SMR instead of PMR so that means that a 6Tb driver of 2020 model has around 20-33% less platters and heads, but the prices seems to be the same. So that means the manufacturer are pocketing the difference as a strait up profit. Now I would not be bothered if SMR drives where CLEARLY marketed as SMR, like Seagate Archive series, where it was clearly stated they are best suited for single drive use (no raid) and just to store data in a linear fashion. For many of my uses that would be fine and a nice cost saving if I could get like 25% off the price. But no it seems as if WD, Seagate and Toshiba, basically all of the manufactures decided at the same time to rip off all there consumers by selling SMR drives under the same Make and Model as before. I ended up getting the old Toshiba N300 8Tb Drives, have one and as fare as I could tell they are not SMR as of yet and they Cost a lot less then WD now PMR ONLY drives. But my faith in any Hard drive manufacturer is now damaged and ANY new drive purchase will be investigated thoroughly to make SURE I dont get SMR crap for the price of PMR! They should all be sued and pay back the money they ripped consumers of that expected to get the "same" or better drive performance of 2019 models in 2020. NO ONE in the right mind expects a 2020 revision of the same drive to be WORSE in pretty much ever aspect! No shame on you HDD manufactures! SSD's are taking over and this is how you deiced to milk and exploit those that still need HDD's for mass storage?
A small heads up: if you get 50% more efficient, that doesnt mean you can get the same result with half of the work. 50% more of 100 is 150 but 50% more of 50 is 75.
4 года назад+14
@@horusreloaded6387 Yes very true. Classic error by me there :P The only way to know how many heads and platters they use is to open up a 2019 PMR driver and the 2020 SMR equivalent and count them, that would tell us maybe what the cost savings are. But the fact remains, they are saving on cost and converting that strait to profit, the consumer is not getting a price reduction.
You came late to the party. Until Chris Mellor and I got the ball rolling none of the makers would _ADMIT_ they were using SMR in small drives and explicitly refused to tell customers Imagine putting 3 * 4TB REDs in your RAIDZ3 array to replace aging drives hitting 60,000 hour power-on time and having this happen which is what happened to me, then WD tried to claim they weren't SMR drives, then they tried to claim that I was doing RAID wrong.....
I still wont trust WD after this debacle. They labeled the DSMR drives their normal Red drives and the CMR is going to be Red Plus. So people will still accidentally buy the Red thinking its the same as the ones they used to have and not knowing that they need to buy the red plus to be the same... They should have labeled the SMR drives as Red Eco or something else..
There's this wonderful skill people usually have, it's called reading. When properly applied to things like sales listings for an item, as opposed to just reading the actual name and ignoring everything else, it can work wonders.
@@Astraeus.. It turns out that most customers buying NAS drives are corporations where they probably buy the cheapest NAS certified drives available. And I'm pretty sure the WD Red drives are cheaper than Red Plus so they will still get SMR drives.
@@Astraeus.. There's this wonderful skill companies should have, it's called predictability. If certains products of a certain line up have a x quality level, newer models of the same line up should be at least as good as the older models.
Yeah, probably should've called 'em "Red SMR" and "Red CMR". Not including the type of storage in the name is the main problem. Still, though, if the primary consumer of Red drives are companies and corporations, they should be smart enough to learn the difference between Red and Red Plus.
Actually, even typists had in-place correction figured out a long time ago. But I had this awful History teacher (the kind of guy that called everybody "hoss" and "sport" and used only last names, but without the politeness of Mr. and Miss) who would make us hand-write and then type our essays in 6th and 7th grade. If we made any mistakes while typing, which of course none of us were practiced at in 1993, we had to start the page over from scratch. Of course, computers already existed, and the school even had some, so this was a stupid, pointless exercise. Walmart even sold standalone word processors at the time that were the size of a standard typewriter (and oh how I longed for one during those assignments). I was the primary computer lab assistant and lived within eyesight of the school. I don't know why I didn't think to ask permission to type my essays on the school computers, except that maybe he had a rule against it, which would make sense with that asshole. I just had to look it up, but I think that old bastard is still kickin'. I found a 50 year wedding anniversary posting but no obituary in the local newspaper.
What's worse is that the firmware is also different between the two drives. They might both be Reds, but the SMR drive may take more, or less time to quite an attempt at recovering a bad sector, while the CMR drive would probably drop a bad read and send out a SMART error that the data integrity is not guaranteed.
Unless you are using the affected NAS scenarios, the chances of you noticing anything other than having to pay more by avoiding smr is tiny. It does have a small performance hit, but outside of the NAS scenarios there are not many situations you should be using conventional hard drives if performance matters.
@@wyterabitt2149 thats true, but i didn't say its be the biggest consideration - just that it would BE considered. If the price difference between smr and cmr dives of the same capacity was small, i'd probably pay more for cmr for that bit of performance and suitability for a nas if i decide to repurpose later. if it was a big price difference for my main bulk media storage? id probs go smr
Me: Hey I just bought a 2TB Seagate drive and thought that I could get about the same if not better performance as the 1TB Seagate drive I bought 4 years ago. Seagate: You thought *_WRONG!_*
Yes. This always happens. I say we should not use the thing i just made for a demo in a productive environment. They use it anyway, they later cry that the data is not there and they need to make everything again and then they blame me and i have to find a way to solve the problem they created. So annoying.
When I recently bought a couple more WD Red drives to add to my array, I noticed there were newer cheaper models, and thought I was overly paranoid buying the older models still available, justifying it on aesthetics. I'm so glad that saved me from SMR.
Its the notebook 2.5" drives only affected. No farking way in hell a 3.5 black is smr. Blacks are superb drives. After many, many years Ive finally bid them farewell though as 6TB aint enough (remember Raptors?). Got 2x HGST/WD HC520 12TB. They datacenter drive (no more consumer HDDs for me). Fine for normal home pc use (non-NAS/raid). If getting datacentre drives, be sure to get the model versions without power disable. READ the spec & info sheets on company site to ensure. Power disable is a datacenter feature and cause compatibility issues with standard home pcs. You see a lot of bad reviews with datacentre drives because people bought the wrong model. Only buy from stores / sites that list specific full model number. BH Photo is a good one, ive imported from. Trust them way higher than newegg for example. (not that newegg is bad)
About a year ago, it took me sooo much time to figure out why my new HDDs write speed suddenly dropped to ~150kB/s after writing about 10% of their capacity. After a lot of tests, guesswork and searching for vague symptoms online, I realised they were unlabeled SMR drives. I'm really happy those companies don't get away easily with hiding vital information about their products.
YOU JUST MADE MY DAY! I had this exact issue and I can't tell you how many hours I've searched online for answers. My WD 4 bay NAS took SEVERAL DAYS to upgrade from a 2 drive mirror to a 4 drive RAID5. Not only that, but it also explains why i randomly hear it running with nobody connected. All 4 drives are 6TB WD Red! What a waste of my time! Thank you for sharing!
When this news started it's rounds I was very glad I bought the larger drives(luck) that were not affected. I would have been pretty ticked off and I completely understand those that want to sue. It's unfortunate however they won't really get appropriate compensation from a class action suit. Usually it's only the lawyers that win in class actions.
iirc the class action lawsuit actually doesn't seek damages, but a permanent injunction against selling smr drives labeled for nas use. (and costs&fees)
Exactly. The lawyers will get their million$, and the people who got screwed will get a coupon worth $20 off their next WD drive purchase (limitations apply, expires in 2 weeks).
How do you get WD to swap out your drives with a CMR? I can already tell you if I call them I will get some dude in a foreign country that has no clue what I am talking about.
Yes, i know the experience. Back in the day, I'd handle RMAs and things for my Datacenter. i'd get a call center here in the states. It made the process so much smoother. Even when they didn't know what you were talking about, they would usually connect me to the right department.
After interviewing an engineer from WD, yeah that company is stuck with young blood without the huge experience of the elder engineers retiring or being retired. It's literally an HR problem where too many engineers were removed at one time and so you end up with lots of engineers hired at the same time and so many engineers retiring at the same time. I was taken back by the interview, expecting so much more from a senior engineer.
Linus when he goes to his kids school on the day where you talk about your job: I talk and build PC's do some cable management shop LTTstore.com good quality cable ties... Also I swear to god all the dislikes is everyone that works at Western Digital and their alts.
Mostly it's because he's a combination of Jeremy Clarkson and Tim (the tool man) Taylor Every so often he does something serious though - like this one.
"It was just a communications breakdown" doesn't hold as much weight when *all three* of the big storage companies did the same thing. As well, considering the other circumstances going on around this... no, this is obviously not "whoopsie we made a mistake much sorry from us". Do not make excuses for huge multinational/multibillion dollar corporations.
I don't think the breakdown was selling unlabelled SMR drives. There's tonnes of technology in the drives that isn't disclosed, and it isn't a big deal. The problem was that they sold this technology in NAS-drives.
Theres an awful lot of Stockholm Syndrome going on. That or a hell of a lot of postings vehemently supporting HDD companies from accounts which have never posted before You might think its astroturfing. I cant possibly comment on what you might think
After seeing this video I’ve been slowly replacing my WD Red SMR drives in my raid with non-SMR seagate drives and boom, my plex server doesn’t have hiccups every 30-60 minutes anymore. I’ve been scratching my head for a couple years over this. I figured I was safe buying NAS drives from WD, nope.
This happened to me 2 years ago when I was building a new freenas cluster using a row of repurposed wdreds but because it didn't have any labels on the drives themselves for drive type I just thought the drives were bad... Lost about 8 days in productivity and production, I ended up with Seagate. I didnt dig any deeper in this issue but I'm glad this video came out to give me an overview of what happened a long time ago.
@@xenolemon7261 haha PC and Xbox, wow such high performance devices. (poe's law) Slow down over there dude, wouldn't want your toaster to lose all it's data when you drop it into a bathtub.
That's not misleading. A 2 TB (Tera Byte) Drive can store 2 TB of data. The only thing is that it's not 2 TiB (Tebi Byte) of capacity. 2 TB refers to 2.000.000.000.000 Bytes That's 1.82 TiB of capacity and is exactly what all of my 2 TB drives show me. (All of them have even several hundred thousands of bytes more than 2.000.000.000.000, so the manufacturers gave me even more capacity than advertised) It's not the responsibility of the hard drive manufacturers to educate you in SI-units and their decimal and binary variations. If you ever referred to RAM capacity as e.g. 16 GB (Giga Bytes) instead of 16 GiB (Gibi Bytes), then it's basically you who misleads yourself. (And basically every Tech-RUclipsr on this planet, since I never heard any of them say the correct Kibi, Mebi, Gibi or Tebi Byte variation) See the box "Multiples of Bytes" on the right side for reference: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
Metatr0n They did this for so long that it became a status quo as it’s been their standard practice beginning in the late 90s to measure drives “metrically”, even organizing together manufacturers to rewrite measuring metrics for computer storage. No one is going to say MebiBytes as it’s bullshit. Everyone classically understood that it was based in binary not decimal and as such meant that in the context of computing, it would be 1024 kilobytes, not 1000. I hate that they got away with this shite and that people growing up afterwards might just accept it as such despite only being a measurement pushed factitiously by storage manufacturers.
@@Metatr0n I couldn't disagree more. while technically correct (and believe me, i've known about it all along), the reality is no OS measures in TB, it's measured in TiB. as a software engineer, i would tell you there's very good reason for that and it's called binary. there is absolutely no valid reason HD manufacturers can not represent their drives in the same units the OS uses if not to inflate their value
@@Music-bf3vn Just so you know, I'm in the IT business for 15 years now, I once or twice stumbled upon words like "binary". Your argument "Any OS measures in TiB" doesn't hold, since as hard drive manufacturers, they can't give a shit what OS developers do or how they represent data as. On top of that, Windows for example shows and always has shown the capacity in TiB but labels it as TB, so what should a hard drive manufacturer do about that? I don't know where you're from, maybe it's an US problem that in IT the correct binary SI-units aren't taught, I can tell you that in Germany for over 30 years, even before ISO, IEEE and IEC managed to get to a common denominator, the binary version was taught in universities. For some people it might look like a technicality but in fact, the difference between the decimal and the binary version is just as significant as the difference between grams and ounces. Historically speaking, the first ever commercially offered HDD was the IBM 350 with 50 physical platters each loaded with 50,000 sectors, each loaded with 100 characters. This capacity was advertised as "5 million characters". Then, since 1974 (not in the 90's!!!) HDD manufacturers used the decimal system to represent capacities, first time 1,000,000 (10^6) Bytes advertised as "1 Mega Byte". With floppies it even went wilder, since IBM defined the standard as 512-byte sectors while 2 sectors were labeled as "1K". Single Sided (SS) floppies with 720 sectors were advertised as "360KB" and Double Sided (DS) with 1,440 sectors as "720KB". High Density (HD) floppies were labelled as "1.44MB" which actually was a mixture of both, decimal and binary, since they had 2,880 sectors with 512 Byte each, thus had a size of "1440K" or rather 1,440 x 1,000 = 1.44 MB. Of course the correct size would have been 1,440 x 1,024 = 1,474,560 Byte = 1.47 MB or 1.41 MiB. (Which Windows has always shown as "1.41 MB"...) Thus they introduced 1024 x 1000 = 1,024,000 as a new definition of "Mega Byte". The Compact Disk for example was always advertised as "700MB" while the capacity itself is binary but the unit is decimal, since the capacity really was 700 MiB. The USB Flash Drive, like the HDD is and was always labeled in decimal. A 64 GB USB Stick is always 64,000,000,000 Byte. As you can see, historically speaking there was always a huge mess when it comes to properly distinguishing between the decimal and binary versions and right after people complain that they feel misguided by HDD manufacturers, I can't really understand the criticism towards the binary Byte, since if it was properly taught 20 years ago, there wouldn't be a whole generation struggling with understanding this mess. HDD manufacturers do everything right, they don't falsely label Tera Bytes as Tebi Bytes to inflate the advertised capacity, nor do they create their own crazy mixed up system to sell less capacity than advertised. Again, it's not the job of the HDD manufacturers to educate 16 year old's whose IT knowledge is based on 7 Linus Tech Tips videos. That's exactly why I always criticize people who claim "Even 7 year old's can build computers". Yes, they can copy your hand movements while holding a screw driver, but they don't understand what the f*** they're doing there and this constant capacity-discussions alone prove me in that point.
@@Music-bf3vn While in general I agree with the thrust of the argument that TB vs TiB is needlessly confusing, the statement that "no OS measures in TB" is simply false and shouldn't be part of the argument. Everything made by the Apple operates in base-10 (1000 bytes per KB) rather than base-2 (1024 bytes per KB). Feel free to look it up support.apple.com/en-us/HT201402
LMG needs a deep dive tech channel for Linux and servers, they have many talented people there who could do such things, like Anthony. Kind of like Level1Techs
I ordered WD Red drives for a NAS about two months before this whole thing blew up in the news. Thankfully, they all turned out to be CMR drives. I've always had faith in WD's products being good quality but I won't be buying from them again for a while.
Thanks for posting this. I just bought 3x 8tb seagate drives, about a month ago, and was using it on my linux desktop in RAID5. When I watched this, I was in the middle of a multi-day reshape of the array, and was trying to debug performance. I had no idea! I was able to return all 3 and bought 3x Exos 14TB drives.
good video! Also, it might be a good idea for ZFS or such file systems to CHECK for SMR drives before RAIDing them and then warn the user. eg It can have a list of the models etc. The NAS software could also warn you based on the list. I also did not realize this until after I purchased some RED drives...
"Why are Drive Manufacturers in TROUBLE?" I bought a 1 TB drive, and when I checked it, it said it has 931 gigabytes! They removed 69 (nice) gigabytes from my drive!
I don’t think you know what it is, it’s much more network focused than task manager, and has far better visualization options. Before people whoosh me, yes I get that this is a joke but it isn’t funny or original
@@signalworks + Task manager hides/shadows windows related tasks. I was surprised when windows setup was downloading updates yet task manager said 0% network usage from installer and no other program was listed that used network but my network card/switch activity LED was blinking like hell.
Back in the 90's when I started building computers, WD started calling their drives "Caviar" drives. This led us to start calling them "Cadaver" drives, because they almost always arrived DOA. Glad to see WD is every bit as predictable as they always have been, and are just as dedicated to screwing over their customers.
Windows Vista, Windows me... R&D, Sales, production... there was just some missed items, we all make mistakes. Drives are being replaced as requested. Good video; time to heal :-) Love your show.
It seems I dodged the bullet here. I purchased a *WD10EZEX 1TB Western Digital Blue 3.5"* drive two years ago, but after the publicism, Western Digital reports this specific drive to use CMR. But it's important I've become aware of this, as I only want CMR drives and the *WD20EZAZ 2TB Western Digital Blue 3.5"* drives I was intending to purchase for my next build are reported to be SMR/CMR. So I won't be purchasing those now, and will look to a reported CMR drive instead.
Totally rooting for the LTT ASMR episode! Linus using raspy voice: "hard drive... ryzen processor... graphics card... AND NOW COMES A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR!"
It is becoming increasingly difficult to source WD CMR drives - I ordered the 4TB “red” CMR model from Amazon (uk) and they sent me the SMR version.... TWICE! Gave up and sourced it elsewhere, but I now have two SMR drives to return to Amazon.
You should have felt that in April. In Germany the website computerbase.de reported on this issue on 15th April 2020. Don't know why it took LMG so long to make a video about this... www.computerbase.de/2020-04/wd-red-festplatten-smr-ohne-kennzeichnung/
Thanks for breaking this down in an informative and non-dramatic way. When all this was originally going down, it was harder to get clear info on why this was serious.
*Scroll to 2nd paragraph for immediate "solution"* How I learnt about SMR the hard way I had to buy another HDD for my laptop, as the one shipped was running short and, being a 300 GB 7200 RPM one was a little inconvenient, thermally-wise, I chose a 1 TB Barracuda, I work daily with virtual machines, containers and I/O expensive stuff, one day all programs started freezing (task manager included), and the drive sounded like having difficulties reading (not clicking but a rough sound) I ran some tests, and found no errors or slow-downs, SMART data was all OK and no bad sectors. 2 months later, I was installing some updates (as I was in Windows 7 and did so manually), and noticed it stuck really long in "setting a restore point..." the noise was still a rhythmic read-stop-read stop... and eventually went on, when it was halfway through, it bluescreened, got stuck in the "install updates and shutdown" endless-loop, after solving it I decided I had enough and RMA'd the drive, when the new arrived I got convinced to let go W7 and upgraded to 10, then 2 days later was ready to resume a virtual machine which I was using and making an important appointment which was due at the time, it went fine but right at the end of "restoring virtual machine state" it slowed down and right before completing it crashed, losing all the work as the virtual disk got corrupted beyond repair, yet another RMA. then in the middle of the problem with the THIRD DRIVE I tested the I/O speed and found out that it was 149 MB/s, but then dropped to 0.91 MB/s then recovered and it went to 430 MB/s which was just imposssible for a mechanical disk, I backed up and took the time of spending 2 days, doing write-read tests and checking, not finding a single failure or nothing to worry about, upon restoring the backup the problem went away altogether, then I started reading about that SMR technology. turns out my older drive was manufactured in 2008 and as such did not have SMR, and performed better despite it being an earlier generation of SATA, outrageous, I ended up throwing the 1 TB disk in a drawer and returned to my old 7200 RPM heater. Then it finally kicked the bucket so I (reluctantly) had to reuse it again, I still struggled with the problem, but I found out that setting my drive optimization schedule from weekly to daily *somehow* mitigated the problem, not perfect but at least was usable, turns out such SMR drive have lots of cache and therefore they need to be TRIMed like SSDs, besides defragging, no program has complained again or had issues with it. deffinitely gonna go for a full SSD when I can afford it, but in the meantime I've had no major issues and the drive optimization does not affect performance, as it stops right when you start using the computer Also worth mentioning, my older drive was a Samsung which indicated PMR and cache size, the new seagate barely said the rotation rate and block count
@@Ben.N especially considering tech venders usually throw as much specs into the title and description as possible the idea of a new added technology not being the main selling point (whether it actually is good or not is irrelevant, tis new) is unbelievable. Edit: through -> throw
Additionally, SMR is defenitely an interesting new technology, but it is not a replacement for CMR. It allows higher capacities at a lower cost, at least some of these savings should be passed down to the consumer. Who even though these should be marketed as NAS drives, that is the one factor that makes me think it could be utter incompetence.
This explains my slow performance and crashes on my synology. Recently replaced a failing wd40efax with a wd40efrx.. Now concidering replacing the other eFax as well.. Thanks for this great explanation!
Haven't bought a WD drive in over 10 years. They lost me as a customer after all my WD drives failed in just a year or two, while my other drives still work to this day.
Have to agree with alexandsimba - the failure rate for Seagate drives is around 2% at the time of writing. For every 50 Hard Drives sold, one will fail. Want to take that risk? I've been using WD's for just as long as you haven't bought them, and not a single one has dropped a beat. I also have 2 Seagates (IDE and even SATA1) from the same period which no longer function. I still have WD's faith - and bear in mind it wasn't just WD who did this little stunt with the SMR labelling either.
It's been the opposite for me. I have WDs from recent years back to the late 90s, all of them still work even if the older ones have loud barrings. Every last Seagate I have around that still powers up and takes a formatting is labelled "NFG". They are prone to failing with a few months of use, usually entire swatches of nodes go corrupt, well beyond what badblocks or the like can compensate for.
I had 5 WD, oldest is 1tb from 2012, newest is 2018 4tb - working without any problems; two Hitachi from 2004 - one sata 80gb and pata 250 gb - work perfect. Only Seagate 500gb hdd from 2007 make me firmware problem - common for a lot users of their barracuda 7200 rpm. Seagate was so rude even I told him HDD isn't detected in BIOS, they continued to reply "If you see it in BIOS is not our problem" DGaS for customers, so I never be their client again, no matter they look hardware good.
I haven't owned a western digital since I added storage to my P-III, always found the same thing for cheaper around the corner . Also don't worry about the hard drive working at 3am when you haven't been on the computer for a couple of hours, it's just the government copying your files
THANK YOU! I finally have an answer as to why my NAS performance is so bad, I checked the drive models and sure enough, they are the SMR varieties! Next step, contact WD for replacement CMR drives. 😁
Yeah every Seagate we've owned has failed spectacularly and fairly early on, my wife is a writer and it has actually caught us off guard and she has lost work because of it. We never buy that brand anymore and she keeps several backups
WD / HGST is the brand to get. Even with backup, ive moved on from consumer and gone with datacenter HDDs. have a look at DC300 & DC500 range. Just be sure to get the model without power disable feature. (read info sheets). They are perfect for normal non-raid PC use. Currently for 10+tb models the cheapest $/gb are the 12tb drives. Recently upped from 3tb & 6tb blacks to 2x 12tb HC520. If you from oz, import like i did from BH Photo. Not everything is cheaper VS oz pricing, but the rarer stuff certainly is. MUCH cheaper
@@tatzecom Nothing is immune from failure, its just that seagate fail at a higher rate. I think Kanga is unlucky however i do not recommend seagate drives. Regardless of what its on, always backup. Theres a chain of thought to save $ by getting cheap drives (its backed up so why bother?), but i go with most reliable because i want to mitigate the risk of time wasting/ fuking around if stuff does go south and any stuff lost in interim periods.
Great video, I heard about SMR from a warning posted on Newegg while I was trying to find a 1 TB storage disc drive for my laptop. Guess what, nobody is making them unless you want SMR. That breakdown of WD drives in your video is on WD.com and the Red 2.5 @ 1 TB model # WD10JFCX doesn't exist yet as far as being able to purchase it. I saw an internal memo posted online from WD mentioning a new Red Plus drive using CMR @ 1 TB so I'm crossing my fingers.
it's not incompetence, it is just that they are too big, and there departments and subsidiaries have effectively become stand alone silos. it is not uncommon in such massive organisations that departments and subsidiaries are competing against each other. it might even bne that WD black and WD red are competing against each other while all being WD.
Why? They should be able to move ALL drives to SMR if they want to, seems like a terrible business decision but it is theirs to make. They did not market the drive as CMR and as far as NAS goes, it would work fine in my setup.
@@beaniiman Their marketing materials advertise the Red line as suitable for RAID configurations. Maybe it works better with hardware/software raid other than ZFS, but if the benchmark here is representative, I don't think it should be advertised as a reliable higher-tier choice for RAID configurations.
@@beaniiman if I pay for a nas drive I want a nas drive,smr is not and never will be suitable For Nas that's why synology one of the biggest nas manufacturers removed Wd red so called nas drivers from there compatibility list.
I immediately checked my 3 4Tb WD red drives in my Qnap NAS. Fortunately they are all EFRX drives (CMR) and not EFAX (SMR). In the meantime I'm reading a lot of complaints from people who did buy one or more of the newer WD Red drives to use in their NAS drive and a lot of drives are failing in a matter of a few months. This is totally unacceptable from WD. The manufacturing and selling of those harddrives, which are totaly unfit to be used in a NAS, should immediately be halted.
![Stromae, Pomme - “Ma Meilleure Ennemie” (from Arcane Season 2) [Official Visualizer]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1F3OGIFnW1k/mqdefault.jpg)
What a nice thing to see after buying a WD NAS drive.
gg better luck next time
www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-lists-all-drives-slower-smr-techNOLOGY what size did you get?
F
And deploying a NAS Server with 20 of them :D
@@hkalisvaart mine is a 3.5" 3TB WD Red. I haven't noticed any slow downs, but still, it's awful to see that they don't market the product right. To be honest I'm coming from a 3TB WD Blue (that fried itself after 3 years). Well, time to try to refund this bitch.
Other hard drives: whispers sweet nothings into their owner's ears.
My hard drive: *REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.*
Yeah dude I had to switch to ssd lmao
all my hard drives broke :(
Sounds like you need to back that up LOL
TJ L THEN YOU BETTER GO CATCH IT
sad but true
This is the transparency we expect from LTT even with thier usual sponsors! Once again... WELL DONE!
The private internet access sponsor didnt age well…
Just looked into my drive I bought from WD
Model is SMR
FML
R.I.P :(
Started to panic a bit after buying two 4TB Reds in March on sale on Newegg, but it looks like I got the good ones, WD40EFRX
@@emerje0 Got an WD30EFRX and an WD30EZRX in my NAS.. How do you check this??
@@st0rm617 st0rm The affected model numbers are listed here: www.hattislaw.com/cases/investigations/western-digital-lawsuit-for-shipping-slower-smr-hard-drives-including-wd-red-nas/
The cat avatar makes this comment better.
You keep saying things like "more capacity on the cheap" as if the drive manufacturers were instantly passing some portion of the savings along to consumers when switching to SMR... when no, at least in the short term they've often been pricing the SMR drives the same as the last non-SMR drives of the same capacity in the same same series.
Yeah it's sadly more likely engineers concerns were ignored in favour of corporate profits
yeah no kidding, they're stealing so much value from customers with this bullshit.
Straight up a KO
yea thats the realy big problem I have with this. SMR is bad enough, the prices tough are the same or even going up now here in sweden on 2020 SMR editions of the same 2019 PMR editions.
Trrruuueee
I'm still wondering why a WD red 4Tb drive is still $150, 5 years later...
Supply and demand
Rare-earth metals
"Because they CAN"
For same reason as prices on PSU, fans etc. Price of material.
In my country is more than 200€, you are cheaper, lol
Me: Phew, glad I went with Seagate for my nas
Linus: Seagate and Toshiba also sold unlabeled smr drives
Me: stops breathing
Linus: just not in their nas lineup
WHOOOO, MAN, WHAT A RIDE 😂
Lol
Yea they are all doing it, been a know fact for many months now. 2020 is the year all consumer drives went SMR (and some prosumer, looking at you WD Red)
@ how to tell the drive is SMR/ CMR if they didn't label it? And does SMR/ CMR matters not just for prosumer, but also for normal consumer?
How’s Seagate drives? Never used it for about 5 years never had a great experience with it other than a portable Seagate that’s 320gb about 10 years old still Super strong the rest Nas and barracudas all failed and with data losses.
Toshiba N300 drives are awesome I have 20 x 14Tb drives running so far for 1 year now with 5 drives fail safe and also remotely duplicated and backed up to another 20 x 14 Tb HGST NAS drives which are Super expensive but Uber reliable. Hitachi drives are the only manufacturer that does not advertise but guarantee reliable. Seagate partnered with Synology and would alert you to failure what I would love to know is how’s the sound and also operations on full tilt and do you think they are better now in terms of reliability? My research always shows me 2 sides of the camp. Personally the iron wolf pro seems awesome to me since it’s cheapest of all the options.
seagate st4000dm004 by any chance? not NAS drives per say but SMR according to the web.. just checked my Qnap DOH 2 of the Sh*ts
THERE ARE NEARBY SHINGLES IN YOUR AREA.
me who bought a wd drive: ah *shit*
loooooooooool......
I’m waiting for Linus to say
“this video is brought to you by seagate”
I'll always stick with Hitachi.
@@kokoleka808 I had a Hitaci drive in one of my laptops. Since then I have upgraded from it for more capacity. The Hitachi is now in a USB enclosure.
@@kokoleka808 hitachi huchiha
Same
HGST
I became aware of the issue a few months ago when I started to run out of space in my FilServer (NAS).
I looked in to WD, Seagate and Toshiba and what I found was that basically ALL "consumer" drivers or to some extent prosumer drivers like WD Red now used SMR instead of PMR/CMR from 2020 and on.
For example WD blue 6Tb, 2019 edition is PMR but if you get one from 2020 it will be SMR from what I could find out.
Seagate and Toshiba have done the same with there "Desktop/Personal" driver series to.
But what I find rely annoying except the fact that NONE of them are marketing there slow crappy SMR drives as SMR, is the fact that the price seems unchanged at least here in Sweden theirs no better deal to be had on the 2020 models compared to the 2019 models.
Like Linus sad, manufactures can get 25-50% more density out of the platters with SMR instead of PMR so that means that a 6Tb driver of 2020 model has around 20-33% less platters and heads, but the prices seems to be the same.
So that means the manufacturer are pocketing the difference as a strait up profit.
Now I would not be bothered if SMR drives where CLEARLY marketed as SMR, like Seagate Archive series, where it was clearly stated they are best suited for single drive use (no raid) and just to store data in a linear fashion.
For many of my uses that would be fine and a nice cost saving if I could get like 25% off the price.
But no it seems as if WD, Seagate and Toshiba, basically all of the manufactures decided at the same time to rip off all there consumers by selling SMR drives under the same Make and Model as before.
I ended up getting the old Toshiba N300 8Tb Drives, have one and as fare as I could tell they are not SMR as of yet and they Cost a lot less then WD now PMR ONLY drives.
But my faith in any Hard drive manufacturer is now damaged and ANY new drive purchase will be investigated thoroughly to make SURE I dont get SMR crap for the price of PMR!
They should all be sued and pay back the money they ripped consumers of that expected to get the "same" or better drive performance of 2019 models in 2020.
NO ONE in the right mind expects a 2020 revision of the same drive to be WORSE in pretty much ever aspect!
No shame on you HDD manufactures!
SSD's are taking over and this is how you deiced to milk and exploit those that still need HDD's for mass storage?
Is this copy-paste from an entire book?
A small heads up: if you get 50% more efficient, that doesnt mean you can get the same result with half of the work.
50% more of 100 is 150 but 50% more of 50 is 75.
@@horusreloaded6387 Yes very true. Classic error by me there :P
The only way to know how many heads and platters they use is to open up a 2019 PMR driver and the 2020 SMR equivalent and count them, that would tell us maybe what the cost savings are.
But the fact remains, they are saving on cost and converting that strait to profit, the consumer is not getting a price reduction.
You came late to the party. Until Chris Mellor and I got the ball rolling none of the makers would _ADMIT_ they were using SMR in small drives and explicitly refused to tell customers
Imagine putting 3 * 4TB REDs in your RAIDZ3 array to replace aging drives hitting 60,000 hour power-on time and having this happen
which is what happened to me, then WD tried to claim they weren't SMR drives, then they tried to claim that I was doing RAID wrong.....
@ dont get me wrong, i was just pointing a small error to fix on an otherwise good comment
Did he literally put his Rode shotg*n mic into the shot...
... just to make an ASMR joke?
Yup
@@ManBearPig617xIts a Sennheiser 416, a rode could never have delivered an ASMR joke that cleanly
Did you censor the word gun or was that RUclips?
? shotgu*n
Ah, don't I love RUclips restrictions? "shotg*n"
I still wont trust WD after this debacle. They labeled the DSMR drives their normal Red drives and the CMR is going to be Red Plus. So people will still accidentally buy the Red thinking its the same as the ones they used to have and not knowing that they need to buy the red plus to be the same...
They should have labeled the SMR drives as Red Eco or something else..
There's this wonderful skill people usually have, it's called reading. When properly applied to things like sales listings for an item, as opposed to just reading the actual name and ignoring everything else, it can work wonders.
@@Astraeus.. It turns out that most customers buying NAS drives are corporations where they probably buy the cheapest NAS certified drives available. And I'm pretty sure the WD Red drives are cheaper than Red Plus so they will still get SMR drives.
@@Astraeus.. There's this wonderful skill companies should have, it's called predictability. If certains products of a certain line up have a x quality level, newer models of the same line up should be at least as good as the older models.
or red smr
Yeah, probably should've called 'em "Red SMR" and "Red CMR". Not including the type of storage in the name is the main problem. Still, though, if the primary consumer of Red drives are companies and corporations, they should be smart enough to learn the difference between Red and Red Plus.
Linus: "Imagine having to rewrite an entire paragraph just to change a word"... Typewriters: "Hold my ink..."
Actually, even typists had in-place correction figured out a long time ago.
But I had this awful History teacher (the kind of guy that called everybody "hoss" and "sport" and used only last names, but without the politeness of Mr. and Miss) who would make us hand-write and then type our essays in 6th and 7th grade. If we made any mistakes while typing, which of course none of us were practiced at in 1993, we had to start the page over from scratch. Of course, computers already existed, and the school even had some, so this was a stupid, pointless exercise. Walmart even sold standalone word processors at the time that were the size of a standard typewriter (and oh how I longed for one during those assignments). I was the primary computer lab assistant and lived within eyesight of the school. I don't know why I didn't think to ask permission to type my essays on the school computers, except that maybe he had a rule against it, which would make sense with that asshole. I just had to look it up, but I think that old bastard is still kickin'. I found a 50 year wedding anniversary posting but no obituary in the local newspaper.
Nah, sod it. I am more of the "backspace and smash the correct character till the paper bleeds" kind of person.
Thats a good analogy
bloodgain when did I ask?
@@bloodgain this was an interesting read - sorry that your teacher wasn't all that great my man.
Imagine getting a ASMR drive, at least its quiet
*whisper* I'm writing your data to disk very gently.
"I'm looking for a hard drive for war"
It's free real estate
@@roebbiej i can't xddddd
Wait until it whispers "just let it happen" and you realize that you're actually in prison.
Imagine copying a 10 meg file and it takes 12 seconds
Ah, the good old days, when 10MB was a lot of data and using floppies made 12 seconds seem like no time at all.
12 seconds? That would be crazy fast using floppies. 10MB in 12seconds is 10BaseT Ethernet fast 😎
I don't have to imagine that.
@@PSjustanormalguy Yeah, I didn't really mean 10MB from floppies ;) I meant doing *anything* with floppies makes 12 seconds seem fast :p
@@PSjustanormalguy lol it's 0.01baset
Hadn't even known CMR/SMR was a thing to consider.
Aaaaand now I know to check before i upgrade my HDDs. Thanks!
What's worse is that the firmware is also different between the two drives. They might both be Reds, but the SMR drive may take more, or less time to quite an attempt at recovering a bad sector, while the CMR drive would probably drop a bad read and send out a SMART error that the data integrity is not guaranteed.
Unless you are using the affected NAS scenarios, the chances of you noticing anything other than having to pay more by avoiding smr is tiny. It does have a small performance hit, but outside of the NAS scenarios there are not many situations you should be using conventional hard drives if performance matters.
@@wyterabitt2149 thats true, but i didn't say its be the biggest consideration - just that it would BE considered. If the price difference between smr and cmr dives of the same capacity was small, i'd probably pay more for cmr for that bit of performance and suitability for a nas if i decide to repurpose later.
if it was a big price difference for my main bulk media storage? id probs go smr
Me: Hey I just bought a 2TB Seagate drive and thought that I could get about the same if not better performance as the 1TB Seagate drive I bought 4 years ago.
Seagate: You thought *_WRONG!_*
Seagate drives in a nutshell: Dead.
@@Aereto yeah, I think I'm on team SSD for the forseeable future
@@Aereto Actually in my experience WD dies a lot more and Toshiba doesn't die unless you do something idiotic to it.
@@jack.h99 SSDs are only the way to go if you don't need large size drives.
Same here my 1TB Seagate HDD last longer (in days and Data transfer) than my 2TB drive
Sean Connery : "Shingles you shay"
I'll see myself out.
😂😂😂👌
LMAO that was random af
Well played, shir oversheer :D
"I'll take, "'Things your Mother gave you" for $400, Trebek"
You're the man now, Dawg!
HDD manufacturer using SMR without telling us? SMH..
I see what you did there...
Literally a joke. You pay so much and they juke you.
Haha. Comedy
the first
Glad you got first and didn't even mention it like a boss. This is the way it should be :)
Engineers: "Don't do this."
Exectuives: "But we can save money and make more profit. Do it!"
Yes. This always happens.
I say we should not use the thing i just made for a demo in a productive environment. They use it anyway, they later cry that the data is not there and they need to make everything again and then they blame me and i have to find a way to solve the problem they created. So annoying.
"Communication breakdown". Is this like "Surprise mechanics"?
Marketing we did it last week
Hence the lawsuit. Legal penalties educate Executives and incentivize compliance with disclosure standards :)
You get what you got, cheap and slow. While expensive qnd fast
When I recently bought a couple more WD Red drives to add to my array, I noticed there were newer cheaper models, and thought I was overly paranoid buying the older models still available, justifying it on aesthetics. I'm so glad that saved me from SMR.
Me: *looks at my WD black 2TB*
"that'll do pig, that'll do."
If it's a 2.5" drive, chances are, it's SMR. Might want to check your drive against their list of SMR drives.
Even one Western Digital Black is SMR. They are scamming everyone in all colours.
Its the notebook 2.5" drives only affected. No farking way in hell a 3.5 black is smr. Blacks are superb drives. After many, many years Ive finally bid them farewell though as 6TB aint enough (remember Raptors?). Got 2x HGST/WD HC520 12TB. They datacenter drive (no more consumer HDDs for me). Fine for normal home pc use (non-NAS/raid). If getting datacentre drives, be sure to get the model versions without power disable. READ the spec & info sheets on company site to ensure. Power disable is a datacenter feature and cause compatibility issues with standard home pcs. You see a lot of bad reviews with datacentre drives because people bought the wrong model. Only buy from stores / sites that list specific full model number. BH Photo is a good one, ive imported from. Trust them way higher than newegg for example. (not that newegg is bad)
Imagine having more than 1TB of storage
Got a wd red 2 tb can relate
About a year ago, it took me sooo much time to figure out why my new HDDs write speed suddenly dropped to ~150kB/s after writing about 10% of their capacity. After a lot of tests, guesswork and searching for vague symptoms online, I realised they were unlabeled SMR drives. I'm really happy those companies don't get away easily with hiding vital information about their products.
Imagine if you had to change a word in a paragraph... I remember not knowing how to turn insert key off thanks.
Linus: "I made a similar argument a few months ago." *shows baby Linus*
Me: "AHHHHH PUT THAT THING AWAY"
It’s like a completely different person.
I miss teenage Linus. Manus isn't as friendly.
THAT'S IT!
I demand payment in the form of a 5 TB NVME SSD for every drive I own....
They'll find a way to make them for $5 each with 1mbps r/w.
YOU JUST MADE MY DAY! I had this exact issue and I can't tell you how many hours I've searched online for answers. My WD 4 bay NAS took SEVERAL DAYS to upgrade from a 2 drive mirror to a 4 drive RAID5. Not only that, but it also explains why i randomly hear it running with nobody connected. All 4 drives are 6TB WD Red! What a waste of my time! Thank you for sharing!
Im pretty sure someone in their management thought oh my, this technology is cheap, lets just use it and undercut our opposition and MAKE MORE MONEY.
Isn't that like every management ever? They never listen to their staff and then blame everyone for their mistakes
Joe Al pretty sure upper management isn’t Indian buddy
2:38 I love the fact that someone's job at Linus Media Group was to write this text. Amazing company
I'm so glad you're around LInus, telling us the stuff we need to know to navigate the minefield of computing safely!
I legitimately enjoy watching Linus advertise the store in the most inconvenient times, it makes my day
no
@RITA - F U С К М Е !!!!! OPEN MY CANAL !!! ok
@@namename-zu8uk dude you ok? 😂
When this news started it's rounds I was very glad I bought the larger drives(luck) that were not affected. I would have been pretty ticked off and I completely understand those that want to sue. It's unfortunate however they won't really get appropriate compensation from a class action suit. Usually it's only the lawyers that win in class actions.
thats not what erin brocovitch said
iirc the class action lawsuit actually doesn't seek damages, but a permanent injunction against selling smr drives labeled for nas use. (and costs&fees)
Exactly. The lawyers will get their million$, and the people who got screwed will get a coupon worth $20 off their next WD drive purchase (limitations apply, expires in 2 weeks).
@@LMacNeill And usually, the company that screwed over their customers won't even admit any wrongdoing.
@@LMacNeill lmao
How do you get WD to swap out your drives with a CMR? I can already tell you if I call them I will get some dude in a foreign country that has no clue what I am talking about.
facts
Yes, i know the experience. Back in the day, I'd handle RMAs and things for my Datacenter. i'd get a call center here in the states. It made the process so much smoother. Even when they didn't know what you were talking about, they would usually connect me to the right department.
I'm so glad I use older computer equipment. Now, what cassette did I leave that program on?
Just type it from the paper backup. It's quicker!
Whoever keeps upgrading your intro, you need to give them a promotion.
Just found out the 4TB Seagate drives I use to work on client wedding photo albums are SMR. I will be getting in touch with Seagate me thinks...
Could still be suitable for this. CMR cache is 70GB-100GB. It is ZFS resilvering or continuous random writes > say 50GB that screws performance.
Hanlon's Razor: Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
Well malice draws from stupidity most of the time ....
I've heard of Occam's razor, there's a Hanlon's razor too now? What's the deal with philosophy and razors??
Yep. Dilbert for years...
Gaming Turkey there are actually several lmao
@@beri4138 It started with Occam's Razor but the term razor has been adopted as a way of shaving off logical conclusions for other reasons as well.
Over 2 months ago I emailed WD support to inquire whether my drive was SMR or CMR/PMR, and they declined to answer
Money back
So, it's SMR :)
benny blanco yeah I ended up looking up the model number on forums, and it was indeed SMR
I just thought of this ("just" as-in "2 seconds ago"):
[The acronym] "SMR" should stand for "Shitty-Method Recording".
After interviewing an engineer from WD, yeah that company is stuck with young blood without the huge experience of the elder engineers retiring or being retired. It's literally an HR problem where too many engineers were removed at one time and so you end up with lots of engineers hired at the same time and so many engineers retiring at the same time. I was taken back by the interview, expecting so much more from a senior engineer.
I'm honestly surprised how well WD still does despite its numerous scandals and the SSD competition.
Thanks for the heads-up!
Linus when he goes to his kids school on the day where you talk about your job: I talk and build PC's do some cable management shop LTTstore.com good quality cable ties...
Also I swear to god all the dislikes is everyone that works at Western Digital and their alts.
But before I tell you my job let’s Segway into our sponsor
*tweezers
Mostly it's because he's a combination of Jeremy Clarkson and Tim (the tool man) Taylor
Every so often he does something serious though - like this one.
8:23 Thanks for helping me confirm that my WD Red Pros are CMR drives!
"It was just a communications breakdown" doesn't hold as much weight when *all three* of the big storage companies did the same thing. As well, considering the other circumstances going on around this... no, this is obviously not "whoopsie we made a mistake much sorry from us". Do not make excuses for huge multinational/multibillion dollar corporations.
8:32
I don't think the breakdown was selling unlabelled SMR drives. There's tonnes of technology in the drives that isn't disclosed, and it isn't a big deal. The problem was that they sold this technology in NAS-drives.
Theres an awful lot of Stockholm Syndrome going on. That or a hell of a lot of postings vehemently supporting HDD companies from accounts which have never posted before
You might think its astroturfing. I cant possibly comment on what you might think
Whoever thought of "shingles" in a drive should be shot.
@@encycl07pedia- Point Blank in the chest with a shotgun
What a good thing to see when i just got notified that my WD Blue has just been shipped
Wd blues aren't affected afaik and you probably wouldn't notice for your use cases anyways
@@smurfendrek4791 Wrong. WD Blue has plenty of SMR drives.
@@smurfendrek4791 WD20EZAZ is affected
After seeing this video I’ve been slowly replacing my WD Red SMR drives in my raid with non-SMR seagate drives and boom, my plex server doesn’t have hiccups every 30-60 minutes anymore. I’ve been scratching my head for a couple years over this. I figured I was safe buying NAS drives from WD, nope.
Looks like Yvonne finally got tired of Linus' crap.
Why?
@@ricko13 One of Linus's eyes looks red.
Linus: Normally we don't delve into companies getting sued on this channel.
Me: crys in WAN
This happened to me 2 years ago when I was building a new freenas cluster using a row of repurposed wdreds but because it didn't have any labels on the drives themselves for drive type I just thought the drives were bad... Lost about 8 days in productivity and production, I ended up with Seagate. I didnt dig any deeper in this issue but I'm glad this video came out to give me an overview of what happened a long time ago.
Sigh....I got two WD reds failed in one year and wonder whether they are really for NAS use😩
I can’t believe as this came out 3 of my WD Red 3tb drives just failed in my Qnap TS-451+ NAS
3 without replacement usually means by by data :( that sucks man
Shut your mouth bro I have WD at my house in my PC and Xbox
TOX1C L3M0N not for long...
@@xenolemon7261 Lol the typical "I don't have a problem therefore no one does" attitude
@@xenolemon7261 haha PC and Xbox, wow such high performance devices. (poe's law)
Slow down over there dude, wouldn't want your toaster to lose all it's data when you drop it into a bathtub.
Drive manufacturers have been misleading customers for ever. I still talk to people that think a 2TB drive should be able to store 2TB of data.
That's not misleading. A 2 TB (Tera Byte) Drive can store 2 TB of data. The only thing is that it's not 2 TiB (Tebi Byte) of capacity.
2 TB refers to 2.000.000.000.000 Bytes
That's 1.82 TiB of capacity and is exactly what all of my 2 TB drives show me. (All of them have even several hundred thousands of bytes more than 2.000.000.000.000, so the manufacturers gave me even more capacity than advertised)
It's not the responsibility of the hard drive manufacturers to educate you in SI-units and their decimal and binary variations. If you ever referred to RAM capacity as e.g. 16 GB (Giga Bytes) instead of 16 GiB (Gibi Bytes), then it's basically you who misleads yourself. (And basically every Tech-RUclipsr on this planet, since I never heard any of them say the correct Kibi, Mebi, Gibi or Tebi Byte variation)
See the box "Multiples of Bytes" on the right side for reference: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
Metatr0n They did this for so long that it became a status quo as it’s been their standard practice beginning in the late 90s to measure drives “metrically”, even organizing together manufacturers to rewrite measuring metrics for computer storage. No one is going to say MebiBytes as it’s bullshit. Everyone classically understood that it was based in binary not decimal and as such meant that in the context of computing, it would be 1024 kilobytes, not 1000. I hate that they got away with this shite and that people growing up afterwards might just accept it as such despite only being a measurement pushed factitiously by storage manufacturers.
@@Metatr0n I couldn't disagree more. while technically correct (and believe me, i've known about it all along), the reality is no OS measures in TB, it's measured in TiB. as a software engineer, i would tell you there's very good reason for that and it's called binary. there is absolutely no valid reason HD manufacturers can not represent their drives in the same units the OS uses if not to inflate their value
@@Music-bf3vn Just so you know, I'm in the IT business for 15 years now, I once or twice stumbled upon words like "binary".
Your argument "Any OS measures in TiB" doesn't hold, since as hard drive manufacturers, they can't give a shit what OS developers do or how they represent data as. On top of that, Windows for example shows and always has shown the capacity in TiB but labels it as TB, so what should a hard drive manufacturer do about that?
I don't know where you're from, maybe it's an US problem that in IT the correct binary SI-units aren't taught, I can tell you that in Germany for over 30 years, even before ISO, IEEE and IEC managed to get to a common denominator, the binary version was taught in universities.
For some people it might look like a technicality but in fact, the difference between the decimal and the binary version is just as significant as the difference between grams and ounces.
Historically speaking, the first ever commercially offered HDD was the IBM 350 with 50 physical platters each loaded with 50,000 sectors, each loaded with 100 characters. This capacity was advertised as "5 million characters". Then, since 1974 (not in the 90's!!!) HDD manufacturers used the decimal system to represent capacities, first time 1,000,000 (10^6) Bytes advertised as "1 Mega Byte".
With floppies it even went wilder, since IBM defined the standard as 512-byte sectors while 2 sectors were labeled as "1K". Single Sided (SS) floppies with 720 sectors were advertised as "360KB" and Double Sided (DS) with 1,440 sectors as "720KB". High Density (HD) floppies were labelled as "1.44MB" which actually was a mixture of both, decimal and binary, since they had 2,880 sectors with 512 Byte each, thus had a size of "1440K" or rather 1,440 x 1,000 = 1.44 MB. Of course the correct size would have been 1,440 x 1,024 = 1,474,560 Byte = 1.47 MB or 1.41 MiB. (Which Windows has always shown as "1.41 MB"...) Thus they introduced 1024 x 1000 = 1,024,000 as a new definition of "Mega Byte".
The Compact Disk for example was always advertised as "700MB" while the capacity itself is binary but the unit is decimal, since the capacity really was 700 MiB.
The USB Flash Drive, like the HDD is and was always labeled in decimal. A 64 GB USB Stick is always 64,000,000,000 Byte.
As you can see, historically speaking there was always a huge mess when it comes to properly distinguishing between the decimal and binary versions and right after people complain that they feel misguided by HDD manufacturers, I can't really understand the criticism towards the binary Byte, since if it was properly taught 20 years ago, there wouldn't be a whole generation struggling with understanding this mess.
HDD manufacturers do everything right, they don't falsely label Tera Bytes as Tebi Bytes to inflate the advertised capacity, nor do they create their own crazy mixed up system to sell less capacity than advertised. Again, it's not the job of the HDD manufacturers to educate 16 year old's whose IT knowledge is based on 7 Linus Tech Tips videos. That's exactly why I always criticize people who claim "Even 7 year old's can build computers". Yes, they can copy your hand movements while holding a screw driver, but they don't understand what the f*** they're doing there and this constant capacity-discussions alone prove me in that point.
@@Music-bf3vn While in general I agree with the thrust of the argument that TB vs TiB is needlessly confusing, the statement that "no OS measures in TB" is simply false and shouldn't be part of the argument. Everything made by the Apple operates in base-10 (1000 bytes per KB) rather than base-2 (1024 bytes per KB). Feel free to look it up support.apple.com/en-us/HT201402
Introducing WD Brown featuring SMR technology (Shitty Magnetic Recording)
fun fact:
justine is 2 years older than linus
You are joking right? How old is she?
actually if I remember correctly, 3 years older. Linus was born in 86 and Justine was born in 83
@@daoquang900 wow she looks 20
You'd think shed be 2000 years older, that's how much I age every time I try to do anything on an cRapple device!
Justine has been looking like she's in her late 30's since 2009
11:50 Haha that table slam reaction... I love it when they keep stuff like that in.
"A number of months ago" = Nearly 2 years ago
Damn does time fly
This format is excellent... I'd actually love a long term news cast from Riley or James if they have the time.
Throw in Steven Rourke from Gamers Nexus, and you have an unbeatable newscrew.
LMG needs a deep dive tech channel for Linux and servers, they have many talented people there who could do such things, like Anthony. Kind of like Level1Techs
@@joonglegamer9898 what would you do with the old screw? Ayooo
@@JackSQL Find the nut!
Roses are red
Linus' beard is quite nice
When I hear that segway
I double tap right
*segue
I ordered WD Red drives for a NAS about two months before this whole thing blew up in the news. Thankfully, they all turned out to be CMR drives. I've always had faith in WD's products being good quality but I won't be buying from them again for a while.
I too dodged a bullet accidentally. I was about to buy WD40EFAX but then saw the article and bought EFRX.
I'm betting a MBA in WD thought he could make WD a bit more money
Quick and dirty money works for software but not for hardware. Ergo compare Microsoft and WD
Yep, this is the kind of crap that happens when Manglement gets involved and starts making bad decisions
@@kingneutron1 Manglement 😂 love it!
Thanks for posting this. I just bought 3x 8tb seagate drives, about a month ago, and was using it on my linux desktop in RAID5. When I watched this, I was in the middle of a multi-day reshape of the array, and was trying to debug performance. I had no idea! I was able to return all 3 and bought 3x Exos 14TB drives.
imagine a world where drive manufacturers actually had to show the actual drive space on a unit.
That was my assumption as to what the topic of this video was going to be.
Something like this xd www.hddzone.com/blog/images/WD8088AADS.jpg
Holy shit, did these drives really existed?
this is windows fault they use the wrong Unit of measurement
Imagine a world where people actually know the difference between binary and decimal SI units. Oh wait, you can't!
Linus: dunks on Hard drives
SSD manufacturers: *Epic gamer moment*
And showed 8tb m.2 ssd few days before
I cannot fucking believe this got 75 likes in 20 minutes when there's literally no setup punchline or even joke
...man, what has youtube becomd
@@pravda9646 A source of idiots and geniuses depending on who or what you watch
@@pravda9646 It's 2020 youtube, what do you expect, funny jokes?
@@mercian9425 Fair enough
good video! Also, it might be a good idea for ZFS or such file systems to CHECK for SMR drives before RAIDing them and then warn the user. eg It can have a list of the models etc. The NAS software could also warn you based on the list. I also did not realize this until after I purchased some RED drives...
I just wanted him to say “smh”
"Why are Drive Manufacturers in TROUBLE?"
I bought a 1 TB drive, and when I checked it, it said it has 931 gigabytes! They removed 69 (nice) gigabytes from my drive!
That is just the extra space needed to have the filesystems data table.
Nope, it does not have 931 gigabytes. It has 1000 gigabytes, which is the same as 931 gibibytes.
@@glibberglobber9358 It was a joke, but I appreciate the explanation very much.
@@Max24871 $0.99 = $1.00 ?
Nah you bought a 1000000000000 bytes drive, so base 10. But your pc counts in 1024. KiB, MiB, Gib,...
"Storage, it's complicated," has to be one of the most underratted comments in the technology industry (12:20). Computers alone are complicated.
Other sponsors for LTT: *exists*
Glasswire: I’m about to end this man’s whole career
Glass wire: monitors apps on your PC to see if they are behaving badly.
Task manager: Am I a joke to you?
I don’t think you know what it is, it’s much more network focused than task manager, and has far better visualization options. Before people whoosh me, yes I get that this is a joke but it isn’t funny or original
@@signalworks + Task manager hides/shadows windows related tasks. I was surprised when windows setup was downloading updates yet task manager said 0% network usage from installer and no other program was listed that used network but my network card/switch activity LED was blinking like hell.
When your comment section are just smart boomers
@@paolovincedelgado559 What an oxymoron you have there... Impressive.
Back in the 90's when I started building computers, WD started calling their drives "Caviar" drives. This led us to start calling them "Cadaver" drives, because they almost always arrived DOA. Glad to see WD is every bit as predictable as they always have been, and are just as dedicated to screwing over their customers.
This episode is kind of like a Tech Quickie and i dig it :P
I am still surprised we have two different definitions on what a terabyte's size is. Hard drive manufacturers should be sued over that as well.
Windows Vista, Windows me... R&D, Sales, production... there was just some missed items, we all make mistakes. Drives are being replaced as requested. Good video; time to heal :-) Love your show.
"ether higher capacity or faster hard drive" how about both but with a twist, low capacity and slow
This was genuinely interesting and really educational for me, I love it!
It seems I dodged the bullet here. I purchased a *WD10EZEX 1TB Western Digital Blue 3.5"* drive two years ago, but after the publicism, Western Digital reports this specific drive to use CMR. But it's important I've become aware of this, as I only want CMR drives and the *WD20EZAZ 2TB Western Digital Blue 3.5"* drives I was intending to purchase for my next build are reported to be SMR/CMR. So I won't be purchasing those now, and will look to a reported CMR drive instead.
Totally rooting for the LTT ASMR episode!
Linus using raspy voice: "hard drive... ryzen processor... graphics card... AND NOW COMES A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR!"
I'm still hoping to see him ride a self balancing 2 wheeled device across the room while saying, "and now a Segway to our sponsor..."
Good thing I havent bought a Harddrive in a looooong time!
...because I'm still using my 8 year old one even if it makes strange noises sometimes...
Might want to back up your data from that drive. If it is important I mean.
its like other electronics, just shake it a bit while its on, that will make it go away. (this is a joke)
better back it up with wds smr drives.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to source WD CMR drives - I ordered the 4TB “red” CMR model from Amazon (uk) and they sent me the SMR version.... TWICE! Gave up and sourced it elsewhere, but I now have two SMR drives to return to Amazon.
I can feel the stock value of WD free falling.
Stocks on sale
You should have felt that in April. In Germany the website computerbase.de reported on this issue on 15th April 2020. Don't know why it took LMG so long to make a video about this...
www.computerbase.de/2020-04/wd-red-festplatten-smr-ohne-kennzeichnung/
WD a titan of the storage industry, and master of bait and switch.
Thanks for breaking this down in an informative and non-dramatic way. When all this was originally going down, it was harder to get clear info on why this was serious.
"Storage is Complicate".
Yes, Yes it is.
AND TODAY`S VIDEO IS BROUGHT BY:
LINUS;
Tech Norris
*Scroll to 2nd paragraph for immediate "solution"*
How I learnt about SMR the hard way
I had to buy another HDD for my laptop, as the one shipped was running short and, being a 300 GB 7200 RPM one was a little inconvenient, thermally-wise, I chose a 1 TB Barracuda, I work daily with virtual machines, containers and I/O expensive stuff, one day all programs started freezing (task manager included), and the drive sounded like having difficulties reading (not clicking but a rough sound) I ran some tests, and found no errors or slow-downs, SMART data was all OK and no bad sectors. 2 months later, I was installing some updates (as I was in Windows 7 and did so manually), and noticed it stuck really long in "setting a restore point..." the noise was still a rhythmic read-stop-read stop... and eventually went on, when it was halfway through, it bluescreened, got stuck in the "install updates and shutdown" endless-loop, after solving it I decided I had enough and RMA'd the drive, when the new arrived I got convinced to let go W7 and upgraded to 10, then 2 days later was ready to resume a virtual machine which I was using and making an important appointment which was due at the time, it went fine but right at the end of "restoring virtual machine state" it slowed down and right before completing it crashed, losing all the work as the virtual disk got corrupted beyond repair, yet another RMA. then in the middle of the problem with the THIRD DRIVE I tested the I/O speed and found out that it was 149 MB/s, but then dropped to 0.91 MB/s then recovered and it went to 430 MB/s which was just imposssible for a mechanical disk, I backed up and took the time of spending 2 days, doing write-read tests and checking, not finding a single failure or nothing to worry about, upon restoring the backup the problem went away altogether, then I started reading about that SMR technology. turns out my older drive was manufactured in 2008 and as such did not have SMR, and performed better despite it being an earlier generation of SATA, outrageous, I ended up throwing the 1 TB disk in a drawer and returned to my old 7200 RPM heater.
Then it finally kicked the bucket so I (reluctantly) had to reuse it again, I still struggled with the problem, but I found out that setting my drive optimization schedule from weekly to daily *somehow* mitigated the problem, not perfect but at least was usable, turns out such SMR drive have lots of cache and therefore they need to be TRIMed like SSDs, besides defragging, no program has complained again or had issues with it. deffinitely gonna go for a full SSD when I can afford it, but in the meantime I've had no major issues and the drive optimization does not affect performance, as it stops right when you start using the computer
Also worth mentioning, my older drive was a Samsung which indicated PMR and cache size, the new seagate barely said the rotation rate and block count
Linus : 91/2...
Me: That a crap ton of hours!!!
Linus Days!!!
Me: Wait What the Fu..
*Frolic/Curb your Enthusiasm plays in the background*
Sounds like Hanlon's Razor to me:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
They knew, no question.
WD is not stupid, they just thought they could get away with it.
@@Ben.N Cynical but certainly not unlikely. It wouldn't be the first time a tech company has acted like an asshole for money.
@@Ben.N especially considering tech venders usually throw as much specs into the title and description as possible the idea of a new added technology not being the main selling point (whether it actually is good or not is irrelevant, tis new) is unbelievable.
Edit: through -> throw
Additionally, SMR is defenitely an interesting new technology, but it is not a replacement for CMR.
It allows higher capacities at a lower cost, at least some of these savings should be passed down to the consumer.
Who even though these should be marketed as NAS drives, that is the one factor that makes me think it could be utter incompetence.
This explains my slow performance and crashes on my synology.
Recently replaced a failing wd40efax with a wd40efrx.. Now concidering replacing the other eFax as well..
Thanks for this great explanation!
this is the kind of content we really appreciate from linus
tech tips
Haven't bought a WD drive in over 10 years. They lost me as a customer after all my WD drives failed in just a year or two, while my other drives still work to this day.
Have to agree with alexandsimba - the failure rate for Seagate drives is around 2% at the time of writing.
For every 50 Hard Drives sold, one will fail. Want to take that risk?
I've been using WD's for just as long as you haven't bought them, and not a single one has dropped a beat. I also have 2 Seagates (IDE and even SATA1) from the same period which no longer function.
I still have WD's faith - and bear in mind it wasn't just WD who did this little stunt with the SMR labelling either.
It's been the opposite for me. I have WDs from recent years back to the late 90s, all of them still work even if the older ones have loud barrings. Every last Seagate I have around that still powers up and takes a formatting is labelled "NFG". They are prone to failing with a few months of use, usually entire swatches of nodes go corrupt, well beyond what badblocks or the like can compensate for.
As others have chimed in youre are the outlier. WD / HGST drives are the best.
I had 5 WD, oldest is 1tb from 2012, newest is 2018 4tb - working without any problems; two Hitachi from 2004 - one sata 80gb and pata 250 gb - work perfect. Only Seagate 500gb hdd from 2007 make me firmware problem - common for a lot users of their barracuda 7200 rpm. Seagate was so rude even I told him HDD isn't detected in BIOS, they continued to reply "If you see it in BIOS is not our problem" DGaS for customers, so I never be their client again, no matter they look hardware good.
I haven't owned a western digital since I added storage to my P-III, always found the same thing for cheaper around the corner . Also don't worry about the hard drive working at 3am when you haven't been on the computer for a couple of hours, it's just the government copying your files
We need a Linus tech ASMR (LTASMR) now, so he can whisper sweet tech reviews in my ears as I sleep
Everyone: *thinks editors have all the power at LTT*
Patrick: *Has all the power at LTT*
THANK YOU! I finally have an answer as to why my NAS performance is so bad, I checked the drive models and sure enough, they are the SMR varieties! Next step, contact WD for replacement CMR drives. 😁
Yeah every Seagate we've owned has failed spectacularly and fairly early on, my wife is a writer and it has actually caught us off guard and she has lost work because of it. We never buy that brand anymore and she keeps several backups
WD / HGST is the brand to get. Even with backup, ive moved on from consumer and gone with datacenter HDDs. have a look at DC300 & DC500 range. Just be sure to get the model without power disable feature. (read info sheets). They are perfect for normal non-raid PC use. Currently for 10+tb models the cheapest $/gb are the 12tb drives. Recently upped from 3tb & 6tb blacks to 2x 12tb HC520. If you from oz, import like i did from BH Photo. Not everything is cheaper VS oz pricing, but the rarer stuff certainly is. MUCH cheaper
@@fredfinks Yep actually, got HGST for storage at the moment
@@tatzecom Nothing is immune from failure, its just that seagate fail at a higher rate. I think Kanga is unlucky however i do not recommend seagate drives. Regardless of what its on, always backup. Theres a chain of thought to save $ by getting cheap drives (its backed up so why bother?), but i go with most reliable because i want to mitigate the risk of time wasting/ fuking around if stuff does go south and any stuff lost in interim periods.
Transfer a file. Goes into the cache.
So if you turn off your computer before the cache is dumped, rest in peace your data
Nah,its just easy read/write CMR parts on the platter that are used as bigger (several Gbs) cache, no DRAM ( Yes,some but thats the usual thing).
Great video, I heard about SMR from a warning posted on Newegg while I was trying to find a 1 TB storage disc drive for my laptop. Guess what, nobody is making them unless you want SMR. That breakdown of WD drives in your video is on WD.com and the Red 2.5 @ 1 TB model # WD10JFCX doesn't exist yet as far as being able to purchase it. I saw an internal memo posted online from WD mentioning a new Red Plus drive using CMR @ 1 TB so I'm crossing my fingers.
Patrick: 1-minute explanation
Translation: WD are too incompetent to have intended this.
it's not incompetence, it is just that they are too big, and there departments and subsidiaries have effectively become stand alone silos.
it is not uncommon in such massive organisations that departments and subsidiaries are competing against each other.
it might even bne that WD black and WD red are competing against each other while all being WD.
They're competent enough to develop the technology, not competent enough to see the bigger picture
Being big is not an excuse. its an explanation, albeit one that should fall on deaf ears. They should just FITFO.
They MUST remove SMR from ALL WD RED NAS Drives NOT just tell us its SMR.
Why? They should be able to move ALL drives to SMR if they want to, seems like a terrible business decision but it is theirs to make. They did not market the drive as CMR and as far as NAS goes, it would work fine in my setup.
@@beaniiman Their marketing materials advertise the Red line as suitable for RAID configurations. Maybe it works better with hardware/software raid other than ZFS, but if the benchmark here is representative, I don't think it should be advertised as a reliable higher-tier choice for RAID configurations.
@@beaniiman if I pay for a nas drive I want a nas drive,smr is not and never will be suitable For Nas that's why synology one of the biggest nas manufacturers removed Wd red so called nas drivers from there compatibility list.
I immediately checked my 3 4Tb WD red drives in my Qnap NAS. Fortunately they are all EFRX drives (CMR) and not EFAX (SMR). In the meantime I'm reading a lot of complaints from people who did buy one or more of the newer WD Red drives to use in their NAS drive and a lot of drives are failing in a matter of a few months. This is totally unacceptable from WD. The manufacturing and selling of those harddrives, which are totaly unfit to be used in a NAS, should immediately be halted.
Was that mic setup only for like 5 whispered words? Dedication👍