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I recently bought a batch of 6 "WD elements" external HDDs and quickly found out that - for three of them - the write performance was precipitously degradating. Circumstantial evidence points to shingled (SMR) technology: format followed by trim restores acceptable writing speed, again degrading when used space goes above 50%.

These disks (used for backup) need replacing, and I am of course going to avoid SMR like the plague, but how? Transparency in labeling does not appear to be WD's forte, and I am wondering how to tell SMRs apart from non-SMR, i.e. brands and telltale labels I should look for.

Ideas? TIA

Alien Life Form
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  • Send an e-mail as high up in WD as you can find, telling them why you won't be buying any more of their drives until they stop doing this! – nigel222 Apr 24 '23 at 17:43
  • The ultimate answer is to buy ALL SSD either SATA or NVME then you won't get any SMR drives as SSD don't use that technology. – cybernard May 04 '23 at 17:23

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A bit of Googling found How-To-Geek - So Is SMR Bad? Which Drive Type Should I Choose? which seems to also agree with Wikipedia - Shingled magnetic recording (though that article has lots of 'low data' markers) in that only Seagate are at present clearly stating which drives contain which technology.

Seagate - Which Drive Has What?

At least it looks like if you switch allegiance, you have one reliable source.

In any decision regarding HD purchase, I would always take a look at the Backblaze stats - pretty much the only unbiased research out there & a valuable free resource to the community at large.
Backblaze Drive Stats for 2022
The only downside of their research is just how much data there is to wade through even after they've boiled it down into almost manageable chunks.

Tetsujin
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I can't guarantee 100% reliability but you could use https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/. I've looked up my drives and they're all correctly reported as CMR.

A while back, when customers had bad experience with server drives that were SMR in disguise, WD ended up issuing a semi apology with an explanation of their Red drive strategy: https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/

For the past 5 years, I've been buying dozens of drives ranging from 8 to 20TB, all from their Elements brand (most of the time, it's a WD Purple inside the case) and so far, so good. When I found their blog post in 2020, I took it as a good rule of thumb that 8TB and above == CMR, no matter the "color". I've applied this logic since then and so far, not one SMR drive in the bunch. Quite a few Helium filled drives though.

But if you're less confident with this logic, it doesn't hurt to double check with the first link.

takeshi2010
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