Buyer Beware: Crappy (and expensive) SMR Hard Drives On the Rise

I noticed some sneaky behavior on the part of Western Digital while shopping fr a 4TB bare drive. I've used WD Red NAS 4TB for a white for archiving and I like them overall with a OK price/performance ratio.

I was surprise to see on the comparison table between regular Red NAS and Red Plus NAS that the former was SMR and the later CMR. Really?

CMR is the Conventional tech, SMR is the Shingle tech that's not as good, with slower performance and not as reliable.

The old regular WD Red was CMR, but now it is SMR, and is sold at the same price, for a lesser tech, even though SMR is less costly to produce.

If you still want CMR (you should) you have to upgrade to WD Red Plus for $10 more. Nowhere does it say which is what. Hello WD? The giveaway is the large cache on the SMR drive for identical capacity.

So no more WD Red regular SMR for me. I haven't bought the Plus version either, I switched instead to Seagate Ironwolf for the time being.

Price is identical to the WD Red Plus but it's often on sale for $99.99. Performance is fine, it also runs quieter and cooler than the old WD Red.

Seagate clearly states the tech in the description, WD please do the same, lack of transparency is eroding consumer's trust in your brand.

For more info on SMR and CMR tech, read this excellent article by ArsTechnica.

For more info on WD Drives, see this blog page:

For more info on Seagate Drives, see this webpage: