Western Digital's NAS disk is slaughtered in testing
Share onThese are consumer counters! Mass litigation on the way.
These are consumer counters! Mass litigation on the way.
You may remember we wrote about Western Digital's stunt to save money by placing cheap SMR drives in NAS hard drives?
Used SMR disks in NAS products without disclosing it
A number of manufacturers have "sneaked" SMR disks into the product range, but only Western Digital has done so in a disk series aimed at professional NAS operations where they often run in RAID setups where they have to perform well.
As we reported in April:
"The problem with the disks is that they use" Shingled Magnetic Recording "instead of the better solution," Conventional Magnetic Recording ".
The reason is that manufacturers can tuck in more GB for less money, but as always, it's a minus when cutting costs - performance degrades. "
Western Digital lists on its own website which discs use SMR.
Seagate claims they don't
Of course, Seagate sees its cut to boast that they have never done the same:
«Seagate only produces NAS drives with CMR. We do not have SMR drives in Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro drives, because these are NAS solutions. We do not recommend SMR for NAS, ”explains Seagate chief Greg Belloni to Ars Technica.
It is Hattis Law who has now filed mass lawsuits against the company on the grounds that WD Red disks are being marketed incorrectly and that the company "intentionally tricked and harmed the customers" by not informing.
Serve The Home has done tests on the Red disk WD40EFAX, and found things that should make WD worried:
Goodwill from WD has been reported
Western Digital has no official service order (at least not publicly) to replace SMR disks for customers who traded one without realizing that they were inferior (Western Digital did not disclose this in any form of documentation), but a a number of customers have received new drives for free in the United States.