 Tom here from Warren Systems, and we're going to talk again about Western Digital, their red NAS drives, and SMR. Now, we thought the controversy was over, right? On April 22nd, there was an updated blog post, and after a public outcry and people talking about it, Western Digital said, well, I guess we should probably label those. But let's get into the details and why it's taken so long to have a better update on this. And as it turns out, the SMR technology, while I will admit it does have certain use places in the market, it turns out NAS is probably not that use-pace. So that use case is like maybe single drives, lower workload, inexpensive storage. When it comes to NAS, because of the heavy rewrite, especially in a re-silver process when you rebuild a ray-to-ray, this is a real problem for these SMR drives. And I did not have time myself to test just how long it would take to rebuild some of these drives and set one up, but I'm very thankful that Patrick over at Serve the Home did. And their test took a long time, much longer than expected. And they wanted to validate the results. Anytime you're doing this, you want to follow a process, and you want to make it repeatable, you want to make sure the results weren't skewed by some type of one-off. And because it took the SMR drive nine days to rebuild, wow, that was a test to run again, means you're 18 days into testing just to run that same test over again. And the folks over at Serve the Home dove deep into this. Now, they have their entire write-up with all the details. They have a really in-depth video. And what I want to do here is share a condensed video from Patrick that he sent over to me. And the goal here was to raise awareness. This is what me and Patrick both want to do. By the way, if you appreciate the hard work that they put into this, go ahead and read the articles over at Serve the Home and subscribe to their YouTube channel. They have a lot of great content very similar to mine where they cover a lot and even more so than me, some of the bigger enterprise projects and enterprise hardware. So if you like my channel, it's pretty likely you're going to be aligned with the type of content they produce as well. So I'll leave links to their channel, their video, and the articles. And I'm going to roll next, the testing procedure. Like I said, Patrick was kind enough to create a condensed version. So you don't have to watch the whole 20-minute video. If you are looking for something a little bit shorter to kind of sum it up. If you want those more in-depth details, they have all of them including benchmarks and the very fine-grain details you might be looking for. I mean, the short answer is probably something you already know that these SMR drives are not particularly good to be used inside of a NAS and should have never been labeled NAS. But if you want to understand the details of why and some of the science behind it, well, Patrick breaks that down. I'm going to roll into that now. Thanks. Thanks, Tom. We've been about a month and a half designing and executing a test to see what the impacts of the new WD-RED DM SMR drives are compared to all the CMR drives that we've seen for years. What we decided to do was take a pretty useful use case. And specifically what we did was we created a CMR-only ZFS RAID-Z array, a 4-drive array. This was a pretty typical NAS for an SMB or SOHO market. And we used that RAID-Z array with all CMR drives. And we then took one of the drives. We failed the drive out. We created a load just to make sure that, you know, it's kind of like business is still running as usual. So we had a little bit of read and write workload that was running on the drives during the rebuild or the NAS array during the rebuild. We then failed the drive and saw what would happen in terms of rebuild. Would the rebuild times be impacted by these SMR drives? This is a super common use case because, you know, a drive fails and then someone goes out, procures another drive, whether they go to a local retailer, go online, get another drive as a replacement, whatever it is. And they take that drive, they put it in the array, and they rebuild the array to get back that redundancy that they had before. And the reason it took so long was because the SMR drive performed really poorly. Basically, the WD Red SMR drive took about nine and a half days to do our raid rebuild. When we compare that to the old WD Red CMR drive along with the Seagate Iron Wolf 4TB drive and one of the control HGST 4TB drives that we had, we actually saw that they all finished somewhere in the 14 to 17 hour range. The impact of that is that if you put in a WD Red SMR drive and you instinctively go buy WD Red because they have such a long tradition of being great drives, well, you're going to have an array that is potentially at risk of complete data loss for nine and a half days versus 14 to 17 hours. And not only did, because this result was so far out there, we also thought about, okay, well, what if it's just the order that we're using or what if it's the specific drive that we're using? So we actually retested at the end with another physical WD Red SMR drive and we saw the exact same thing. Now, this is not necessarily indicative of every single raid scheme out there or a NAS unit out there, but ZFS is super popular. It's in FreeNAS, which is the most popular open source NAS solution. Also, a lot of Linux and roll your own Linux type distributions use ZFS nowadays. Big appliance vendors use ZFS, especially in some of their kind of nicer arrays. And so ZFS is very popular because people trust it. Since publishing, what we've heard is from our community and from those that have reached out is that even on some other types of raid solutions and other types of NAS solutions, real world testing basically is showing some weird performance things, whether that's errors, slow performance, inconsistent performance, whatever it is. There are weird things happening that we haven't really seen with the CMR drives that we've seen with these new WD Red SMR drives. The bottom line is this. We need to let those in the market know that the old WD Red CMR 64 megabyte of cash drives are absolutely great and they're perfectly fine. In fact, they were the fastest ones in our testing, but the new WD Red SMR drives are not the ones that you want. These have 256 megs of cash. You see them as the newest drive. You may think that they're better, but they are definitely not better. There are a lot of folks out there that are so used to just buying WD Red drives that they don't really pay attention to the drive technology that's there. And as tech experts, it's really our responsibility to let folks know that there's this product out there that a company made a major product shift, didn't really tell anyone, didn't really want to tell anyone, and it has a major negative impact on our arrays and potentially our data. NAS units have so much important data that risking and putting that data at risk for another nine days or so is just absolutely something that we can't see. Since publishing the article, we found that there were actually a lot of form posts and you did see some kind of personal blogs that had some of these experiences out there, but if you're not in the market every day, if you're not a tech expert that's keeping track of this stuff and specifically searching for it in a lot of cases, you just wouldn't find it. So hopefully, we can get more exposure in terms of what are the issues with these new WD SMR drives. And if you want to find out more information, go check out the STH site or the video. We have lots of information in terms of exactly what we did and what we found. Thanks, Patrick. I have links down below to the Serve the Home website, the article related to the SMR drives and research and testing did, and of course, the Serve the Home channel and video they did on this topic. If you're looking for more in-depth and discussion and more details on this project, and thank you. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. 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