on may 29 2020 haddis law filed a class
action lawsuit against western digital accusing the company of secretly selling
hard drives built with smr technology and no the problem wasn't that
these hard drives were whispering neck tingling sweet nothings into their users
ears it's that smr not only makes the drive
slower but in some cases completely unusable for their marketed purpose
here's the thing even though judge judy is
everything i aspire to be normally we don't delve into companies getting sued
on this channel but for this lawsuit i'm making
exception for two reasons one because patrick from serve the home asked me to
and he's just a super nice guy and two
because the reasons that this whole thing is happening and what it means for
the industry and for you are super interesting and super techy
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smr stands for shingled magnetic recording and it's a relatively new
technology in the world of hard drives having just entered the market in 2014.
now as you may know inside a hard drive are magnetic actuator arms that read and
write data to a set of spinning platters
now in perpendicular magnetic recording or pmr which is also known as
conventional magnetic recording or cmr
those platters have single tracks laid out side by side this makes each track
easy to access by the read and right arms but capacity is limited to how many
tracks you can squeeze next to each other on a single platter in shingled
magnetic recording or smr platters are made up of chunks of overlapping tracks
kind of like the shingles on a roof this
technique allows more tracks to fit onto a single platter increasing capacity
but it comes at a cost you see each time
a new track is written it overlaps part
of a previously written track which must then also be rewritten
i mean it sounds kind of insane doesn't it i mean imagine a word processor where
every time you wanted to change a word in a paragraph you had to go back and
rewrite the rest of the paragraph along with your changes terrible
i i mean that experience not ltteststore.com ltdstore.com is great
great products but anyway for hard drives this approach is actually very
sane you see ssds kind of have the whole speed thing on lock these days so most
hard drive innovation over the last few years has been pretty focused on
capacity and shingle magnetic recording allows drive manufacturers to exchange a
bit of performance for as much as 25 to
50 percent higher capacity per platter that means either greater capacities or
fewer platters for a given capacity lowering the total cost
so then that's problem number one really hard
drive manufacturers selling a cheaper product without labeling it as such
but why are people so upset
well you see it's not just that smr drives have slower performance it's that
to work properly they need special firmware or software that can navigate
through all of these overlapping tracks so there are three different varieties
of smr in host managed smr the host
computer must give special commands to the drive
if the drive doesn't receive these commands it simply will not work these
kinds of drives are most commonly used in cloud servers owned by you know
amazon or google where vast quantities
of drives must be controlled the second type host aware smr allows the drive to
respond to these special commands or to regular commands so you don't
necessarily need special software to use that second type but it certainly helps
the third type of smr is where things get messy
in device managed smr the drive doesn't
require special commands and in fact it shows up in your pc as a completely
normal drive most of the time this isn't catastrophic
in fact this type of smr drive usually has a cmr cache which can be written
more quickly for a short period masking that slower write performance this
approach is actually very similar to how many slower qlc ssds use a high speed
slc cache as we discussed in this video
right here so the idea is that when you write some data to the drive it goes
into the higher speed cache and your file transfer is complete your data is
safe but then 20 minutes 30 minutes later you might
actually still hear the drive thrashing away as it dumps the data out of the
cache onto the slower shingled portion
for most home users honestly that's probably fine and they
might even be happy with the trade-off for more capacity on the cheap
but using a device-managed smr drive when
you don't know that it's an smr drive can be catastrophic as our good buddy
patrick found out he and his team tested
cmr drives from hgst and seagate against
two drives from wd's red lineup which is marketed specifically for network
attached storage systems only one small problem without clear markings one of
them was built with cmr and the other was built with smr as expected they
found that the smr drive was slower in almost every typical storage benchmark
which was bad then it got worse the
kicker was the freenas raid z rebuild
now raid is designed to protect your data through redundant copies in the
event of a physical drive failure so the test involves wiping one of the drives
in a raid array intentionally and then tasking the system with rebuilding all
the data that was supposed to be on it the cmr drives all took over 16 hours
which is already a long time to be worried that your data is in this
vulnerable state where if another drive dies it could all be lost
but it is normal for this process to take a while as for the smr drive it
took nine and a half days
what now patrick and co naturally thought
something must be wrong with their test setup so they ran the test again
and got a similar result ours technica also ran some tests finding that in a
random write latency test the wd red smr
drive could take as long as 1.3 seconds to save a meg of data compared to 0.1
seconds on the seagate cmr drive now we
need to mention that servtohome's test server ran on freenas a popular open
source operating system for network attached storage and while smr drives
have clearly been operating without disastrous consequences on other types
of servers freenas uses the zfs file system which
can also be found in a ton of other software from ubuntu and proxmox to nas
systems from qnap and apparently zfs
according to patrick's tests does not play nicely with shingle magnetic
recording now there's some indication that smr might cause problems for other
file systems too since synology has listed wd's smr drives as incompatible
with a huge swath of their nas systems but we don't have the specifics on those
ones anyway all of this would have been fine
if customers were educated properly so they didn't accidentally end up with smr
drives except as we said before wd didn't label their smr drives the only
indication that a given drive was smr or cmr was a single letter in the model
number and because these drives are device managed the end user wouldn't
even realize what they had purchased when they plugged it into their system
now to be fair to wd seagate and toshiba also sold unlabeled
smr drives but just not in their nas product lines
so it was far more unlikely that those drives would lead to the type of
unusable performance seen in patrick's tests
and the good news is that all three vendors have now committed to labeling
the recording technology used in their products and to wd's credit they seem to
be responding well to customers requesting cmr replacements for their
smr drives meaning that the only lingering question after all this is
why how exactly did western digital a titan
of the storage industry for 50 years miss the fact that smr drives are
completely inappropriate for zfs a
perfectly common file system for nasa's and then market these drives for nas use
a question that is made all the more confusing by this video from 2015
showing an engineer from hgst a company
owned by western digital explaining how
dmsmr has tremendous compatibility
problems with cfs and talking about how
much work it would take to make them play nicely together wd clearly should
have listened to manfred instead of evilly throwing their customers under
the bus unless maybe something else happened here i don't think that this is
some kind of evil masterminded plot to hurt nast users by western digital by
any means i think that what's more likely is that this is just a
communication breakdown and process breakdown between the different
functional silos within western digital there's probably an element of this
which is that each person has their own personal and departmental goals aligned
to their function but not necessarily across their entire company and what
that means is that those discussions don't happen to say hey should we even
institute dmsmr into the space if we do what are the tests that we need
to run to make sure that it works on all of our partner systems personally i like
to think that best of people maybe to my detriment but haven't done management
consulting in this space for years prior to doing sth i can totally see how this
happens yeah okay i actually made a similar argument
during the principled technologies benchmark scandal that Intel went
through a number of months ago and i think patrick is probably right here as
well it's just still extremely embarrassing for them
and the class action lawsuit is absolutely in our opinion both
good and necessary because normal people
who bought wd red smr drives may have faced a loss of time data and even
livelihood that they wouldn't have if the product was properly labeled and
honestly they deserve some compensation
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them out at the link in the video description if you guys enjoyed this
video and you like these kinds of deeper dives into storage technology maybe
check out uh oh what was that cool when we did about like tiered storage a while
back can't remember hopefully you can find it
oh oh maybe just server storage why don't we do uh rolling out nuwanik all
the issues with that boy what a disaster that was huh storage it's complicated