Western Digital Red SMR

Discuss and share your WD drive experience
gggplaya
Been there, done that
Posts: 747
Joined: Wed Apr 20, 2016 10:05 pm

Re: Western Digital Red SMR

Post by gggplaya »

FYI to all, WD is now putting out a new line of drives to address their fumblings with SMR. They'll now release a new line called the "RED PLUS" which slots in between the RED and RED PRO drives. It'll essentially be the old RED drives with CMR, lol and the price will probably be somewhere in between.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-ad ... ard-drives
Lancing
New here
Posts: 7
Joined: Sun Jan 18, 2015 10:04 am

Re: Western Digital Red SMR

Post by Lancing »

Not to zombie an old thread but figured I'd put up the outcome for anyone dealing with an exchange.

I had to get bumped up to a higher tier support agent but they did fully cover all costs associated with the exchange and provided me with a PMR drive.

The return shipping label was emailed to me and the whole exchange took around a month.

Post this entire incident WD released a press announcement of their new WD Red Plus line which means they are doubling down on NAS related Red SMR drives. As a result I have begun switching to Seagate Ironwolf drives this year and so far the experience has been excellent.
StefanoBettega
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Re: Western Digital Red SMR

Post by StefanoBettega »

Ok I'm here just because I have a SMR drive in my 24 bay nas (it's disk 9, 1-9 are in use and 10 is hot spare). I was in need to add space and that drive was the only available option.

Now I got some non SMR disk and I want to change that one, before it's too late...

Can I simply pull out the SMR drive and put a new good drive in its place? Will eventually the hot spare kick in?

Thanks,
Stefano
My own NAS: TS-419P II (4 x WD RED 1TB), 1 custom built OMV (AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 1385, 8GB RAM, 3 x 1TB disks RAID5)
My company NAS: TS-EC2480U (7 x WD RED 4TB, RAID5 + 1 x WD RED 4TB hot spare), TS-451 (4 x WD RED 2TB)
P3R
Guru
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Location: Stockholm, Sweden (UTC+01:00)

Re: Western Digital Red SMR

Post by P3R »

StefanoBettega wrote: Wed Oct 28, 2020 10:52 pm Can I simply pull out the SMR drive and put a new good drive in its place?
I would either temporarily disable the hot spare before doing that OR wait with inserting the new disk until I see that the RAID is rebuilding on the hot spare.
RAID have never ever been a replacement for backups. Without backups on a different system (preferably placed at another site), you will eventually lose data!

A non-RAID configuration (including RAID 0, which isn't really RAID) with a backup on a separate media protects your data far better than any RAID-volume without backup.

All data storage consists of both the primary storage and the backups. It's your money and your data, spend the storage budget wisely or pay with your data!
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