 Tom here from Lawrence Systems and Western Digital and Seagate have both responded to the SMR controversy. So we're going to talk about that. If you want to learn more about me or my company, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you like to hire short project, there's a hires button up at the top. If you want to support this channel in other ways, some affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services we talk about on this channel and the controversy over SMR Part 2. So this was interesting when people started discovering it. It was kind of a reverse engineering of drives and of course once they're discovered, the companies are kind of put in a position of they have to respond because it creates a lot of rage in the market, of course. In the shirt of it, if you didn't watch the other video, it's really simple. If you have a drive that has the SMR feature and you are using it in a RAID array and you go to rebuild that RAID array or something happens and you have to replace a drive, the SMR may cause so much pausing due to the way the writing goes and the slow read and write speeds of an SMR drive, specifically slow write speeds, that system may fail to rebuild the drive. I've seen someone comment, well, more than one person comment, reach out to me and ask, well, shouldn't you redo whatever insert name of your favorite RAID system you have these in? Shouldn't that be a firmware update to the RAID system or a design update to them in order to do it? I'm like, no, no, no, RAIDs are not designed to have long pauses that would just not be good. So it is proper that the RAID systems fail these drives out if there's a rebuild problem. The problem really lies in the fact that you shouldn't use these in a RAID. So let's go ahead and look at Western Digital's sad response here, which basically says, buy our more expensive stuff. Even though we put NAS on these drives and SMR is tested and proven technology enables us to keep up with the growing volume of data of a personal business we use. And there's plenty of marketing speak in here. I'll let you read through it. We'll bore you with it. In short, though, what they're saying is buy our more expensive stuff, like the WD Red Pro or WD Gold Drives. So it sounds like this only affects the ones that are labeled WD NAS. And despite their label of NAS, they stand by that these drives are OK to use. But, well, the angry people and all the people have testing problems and have watched these drives rain and we fail out and cause hours of troubleshooting. They have something different to say about that. But this is Western Digital's response like it or not. I personally don't care for it. That is what they're doing. I think these drives should have been clearly labeled from the beginning. Seagate, they have a little bit different response. Seagate says network attached storage and SMR don't mix. Good. Seagate made a stance on this, except Seagate's answer is if you're using some of these drives, they may or may not be labeled as SMR unless you get R. And I have one right here, you know, for example, their actual iron wolf drives. So their iron wolf drives, which are truly their, you know, better, higher quality NAS drives are the ones that do not have this in there. So that's great. I just wish these companies were extremely clear. Like just put a sticker on it, guys. It's not hard that way we know. And obviously the reason they don't is because if us as the consumer of these products knew this piece of information, we would avoid that particular product. But that means, well, they would lose sales, so they're not ready for that. But it's not like we wouldn't have ever figured out. They were probably just hoping no one ever filled up their drives because, you know, no one ever buys a NAS and actually fills it up and then has to resell for one, right? Well, anyways, back to CK's response. This is what I like over here in this particular article of our segment. There's a lot of wiggle room in here, and this is referring to their statements. We published when we pushed on the issue of the SMR drives and CK's desktop channel, he told us CK didn't feel the need to break it out in that channel. And this is the part that is obviously really annoying in terms of that. So, you know, they're saying that, yes, their iron wolves and specifically those drives are not SMR. So that hopefully will, you know, if you have a Seagate, if you already went with the iron wolf good, if you didn't, well, the controversy is going to continue while we try to figure out exactly which models are and are not, because it's not being clearly labeled. But what hard drives do you buy? And that's why I like to reference this. So this is a blog post by Backplace. I've covered these before. Backplace hard drive stats for 2019. This one in particular was published on February 11th, 2020. And Backplace just hands down has the best drive reporting I've ever seen. And let me explain why. So one, they may not have the drive you want. And they have an entire explainer for how they buy hard drives and why they may not have the drives you were particularly looking for that you were hoping they reviewed because of the bulk purchases they make. When they talk about drive counts, they have 12,000 drives here, 1,000, 1,000, 14,000 broke out by model number. Now, this is where people often skew statistics. And we'll come back to this in a second. And I see people complaining, I had a lot of failures with these drives, or especially technicians and even my own technicians have certainly fallen into this. It's a misunderstanding of how people handle statistics. Let's say we fix, and we do, we fix a lot of computers and we see a lot of failures with a particular drive. The only way you can really say that that drive fails a lot is if you have the whole market statistic for it. So if there were an equal number of two different brand drives, let's say we 10,000 Western Digitals and 10,000 Seagates, equally distributed amongst systems, and now we have a failure rate that we can track. That would be great, but we don't. Usually what happens is a drive has a really good price and price performance, so a quantity of them are brought out to the market and sold. And they end up making up the majority of a certain year, perhaps, of that channel where they're like, wow, there's this many drives installed, so they're very frequently the ones you find in either desktop computers or in, you know, commercial equipment. Whatever that product line was, it was the great price performance that they bought it. Therefore, the most likely ones to fail are the ones that have the majority of the market. You don't have the other side of statistics. And this is something I really have people look at, because also people only call you with the failures if you're dealing with that, versus the people who didn't bring it in and didn't fail, so now you don't have that other side of statistic as well. You can see how this can get a little bit complicated really quick, but understanding stats is really important, and just because there's a lot of them in the market or a lot of people posting in a form, oh, I had this one fail, but you look at just how many of them were were in the market of that particular model, and unless you know how many of the opposing ones didn't fail and were the equal number installed, it's hard to get a statistic, unless you're back plays. Then they have some really good information here, a couple of things of note. Drive count, how many drives are out there? Drive days. They have a whole breakdown of how they calculate that, but these are, you know, a cumulative time the drive is running, because obviously saying I have 12,000 particular drives, but they haven't been running for very long and they didn't fail, doesn't give you the failure rate. And even then, it's hard to really, you know, get a good average until you've seen something along the lines of the 12 million hours of running on this particular Seagate. And yeah, we do see a higher failure rate. And obviously just the number of days running means you're going to get a higher failure rate, because as drives age out, they fail more, so it's not like you instantly can look at the Seagate model going that one. That's the one that must be a terrible product to buy. You have to look at one that has a combination of high hours with a low failure rate and kind of do the calculations here and think about it. But I like this, and I'll reference this as a good way to help determine which drives have, you know, high failure rates, low failure rates. And over the time, and you can go back, they have a long history of posting these statistics annualized and broke down quarterly. The Toshiba drives, which I have used in the past, do have, I mean, pretty good luck with that. Actually, I still have some Toshiba ones that are running. HGSTs are some of the ones that we're still using in our office that we've had for a really long time. And when you look at, you know, the million hours or four million hours here of runtime with these four TB ones, and I believe this, one of these two models I don't remember, but one of these, and I'll give you the exact model number, is the ones we still have running in our RAID array that are probably so old they should be replaced, but they just hold backups of a few things now. But that array is still working. Like I can't remember how many years ago we installed it, but we've never had a drive fail in it. And these are one of the ways we used to choose those drives. Now, of course, the other options are going on, you know, looking around for older enterprise drives and things like that, you can find deals on, if you're trying to build your RAID array, those can generally be pretty, pretty good and not likely at all to have SMR if you're looking about like, you know, pulled enterprise drives. And finally, the last thing I'll talk about is hard drive shucking. I actually think this SMR technology, because the hard drives that you can get super good deals on because they're encased in USBs, that is probably gonna end this. As I have a feeling that the majority of those drives, if they're gonna stick something in the channel that they said it's not designed for RAID, it's probably gonna be the ones that are single drives in USB enclosures that you can find great deals on. And there's a lot of other YouTube channels that have covered this and just people in general, like, hey, look, I found a deal on all these USB drives, let's chuck them out and build my RAID array with them. And I've seen everything because I think they've even tried to disable it. And if I'm not mistaken, there's a couple pins that you have to, to get them to work in a desktop. I was watching some videos on this a while ago. It's not something I actually have done, but people have asked me about it and I'm completely aware of it, but I have a feeling this will end it because those drives are most likely now to be the SMR drives and very unfriendly, as we know, to RAID arrays. So they may not be the best places to store all of your data despite their very, very tempting prices of doing that. So this is to follow up on that. So I think this is interesting. I'll leave links to all this so you can do further reading and figure out where to get some drives. I still like the Backblaze reports. I think it's probably the best way to get a good statistical analysis of drives and their overall failure rate and Backblaze has got a lot of interesting articles on this topic and not just the drive reports, but how they build them, you can really dive into all the numbers, but good luck finding hard drives and I, yeah, sad answers on Western Digital and Seagate. Sounds like SMR is not going away and for those of us that are looking for reasonably inexpensive storage for our data hoarding needs, it's gonna get a little bit tricky out there. Thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. 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