NAS drives are always a gamble, SMR or not, you should always keep away from the cheap HDD drives and that also includes cheap SSD’s if you are trying to have a NAS that have a good performance in a Raid setup. So, if anyone needs to know WHAT INTERNAL DRIVE MODEL they have in their WD EXTERNAL ENCLOSURES, install https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo and COPY PAST the info to the clipboard! (EDIT -> COPY or CTRL-C). Paste it to a text editor, and voila!!! Next, we will move on to the tests focused on the WD40EFAX and NAS RAID arrays. WD Red SMR v. CMR Part II: The Not So Good When it comes to data recovery one of the most common problems Western Digital WD40EFRX Hard Disk Drive experience is burnt circuit board(PCB). So if you will need to match a replacement PCB, it is important that you note the “ Board Number” of your current circuit board in addition to the hard drive’s “ Model Number“.

Why is that? Why keep SMR and PMR drives with the SAME capacity in the same line and HIDING this info from customers? So they can target “specific” markets with the SMR drives? It seems like a marketing TEST!!! How BIG is it? People are seeing very poor performance with these SMR drives and Synology as well, even in normal operation. A great example is http://blog.robiii.nl/2020/04/wd-red-nas-drives-use-smr-and-im-not.html The 68N32N0 is a newer model with 3 x 1.33TB platters and only 6 heads. It is lighter, at around 638g in the anti-static bag, and marginally faster than the older model. The top cover is quite different as well. This thread has aged a bit, but for the benefit of people coming here from a search engine, here’s the difference between the two models:But the question for me (as somebody who is about to buy a new NAS as a media hub for Videos and Photos) I still have two old st4000dm005 lying around and would use them and upgrade two additional a cheap 8TB (SMR – st8000dm004) or with the whole SMR NAS drive debate, a very expensive CMR Ironwolf or something like that ? The 68WT0N0 has 4 x 1TB platters and 8 heads. It is a heavy drive at about 700g. I’ve also personally had RMAs involving this model, but of course WD would never admit to a systemic issue. I bought 2 WD40EFRX-68WT0N0 3 years ago. 1 failed after 2,5 months. RMAed. Got another WD40EFRX-68WT0N0. The RMAed one lived nearly 2 years and failed again. RMAed again and this time I got WD40EFRX-68N32N0 - purportedly the newer one. This time I bought additional warranty so I should have 5 years of peace if it fails.

is usually the limit of most electronic components but that doesn’t mean a HDD should go up so high. Dear Western Digital, you thought you could get away with it because a basic benchmark does not show much difference OR you were not even aware of the issue because you did not test them with RAID. Duplicity or lazy indifference or both? On top of which you badly tried to cover it up before finally facing it up. Write tests tell a mostly similar story. As an individual drive, the WD40EFAX is performing pretty well in these benchmarks. PCMark8 Benchmark Robert, that video is very hard to follow. They are using smaller capacity drives with different NAS systems. They are also not doing a realistic test since it seems they are not putting a workload on the NAS during rebuilds? The ability to keep systems running and maintaining operations is a key feature of NAS/ RAID systems. It is strange not to at least generate some workload during a rebuild.In PCMark8, the WD40EFAX manages to outperform the CMR WD40EFRX. The SMR drive has a much larger cache than the CMR version, 256MB vs 64MB, which perhaps helps account for the win here. In these kinds of shorter burst activity workloads, one can see how SMR may be used as a substitute.

Unfortunately, while the SMR WD Red performed respectably in the previous benchmarks, the RAIDZ resilver test proved to be another matter entirely. While all three CMR drives comfortably completed the resilver in under 17 hours, the SMR drive took nearly 230 hours to perform an identical task. WD40EFAX FreeNAS Resilver You will see the family name (Giant or Apollo), number of heads (8 or 6), capacity, RPM, SATA link rate. Then I found out about this lawsuit. And upon further investigation I found out that these disks are SMR. I filed a support request with Seagate. As you can see, with a heavy write workload immediately preceding the CDM test, the SMR drive was notably slower. In some ways, this is like timing a runner’s sprint time after running a marathon. One could argue that you may not transfer 125GB files every day, but that is less data than the video production folder for this article’s companion video we linked at the start. Still, this is a good indicator of the drive working through its internal data management processes and impacting performance. According to iXsystems, WD Red SMR drives running firmware revision 82.00A82 can cause the drive to enter a failed state during heavy loads using ZFS. This is the revision of firmware that came on both of our drives. We did not experience this failure mode, and instead only received extremely poor performance. Perhaps that was because we were testing the use of the drive as a replacement rather than building an entire array of SMR drives. In either case, we suggest not using them.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/western-digital-gets-sued-for-sneaking-smr-disks-into-its-nas-channel/ I knew of the WD SMR scandal. Fortunately, I have four of the WD40EFRZ CMR models, so breathed a sigh of relief. However, WD have gotten off incredibly lightly here. They marketed their Red range as NAS drives, all of them, not just those they knew were CMR. That’s completely unacceptable and the fact they weren’t forced to change those SMR Red’s to Blue or Blue Plus or something, is outrageous.

In the file copy test, the effects of the slower SMR technology starts to show itself a bit. The WD40EFAX turns in performance numbers that are significantly worse than the CMR drives. Would be worthwhile to at least update the following articles with a warning to avoid SMR HDDs when using ZFS: Great article, thanks for the info. Using older WD Reds in a server with ZFS raid, and thinking about buying more on sale… big eye opener here. Had no idea this was a thing but glad I googled it now.WD40EFRX Western Digital 3.5″ hard drive with a storage capacity of 4TB and featuring a SATA interface. WD40EFRX Western Digital Red 4TB 5400RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-inch NAS Hard Drive. Someone said this is part of a RACE for BIGGER capacities. It can be… BUT, before that happens, WD is probably using the most demanding customers / environments to TEST SMR tech so they can DEPLOY them in the bigger capacity DRIVES: 8, 10, 12, 14TB and beyond (do not currently exist). I say this because, WD has the same “infected SMR drives” using the well known PMR tech! https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-red-hdd/data-sheet-western-digital-wd-red-hdd-2879-800002.pdf ABOUT USServeTheHome is the IT professional's guide to servers, storage, networking, and high-end workstation hardware, plus great open source projects. In read tests the SMR drive performs fairly similarly to the CMR based WD40EFRX. HDTune Write Benchmark Something we noticed is that the test that immediately followed the file copy test was a sequential CrystalDiskMark workload: SMR CrystalDiskMark