I read that as 'for critical applications, buy a competitor's drive.' Perhaps reading comprehension is limited on my part.
The key thing I want from a drive is reliability. I don't want to lose my data. That far beats size, noise, speed, cost, or just about anything else in what I will shop on. A drive that loses data will cost my thousands of dollars.
My perception of reliability comes down to trust and transparency.If I can't trust a drive maker, I won't buy from them.
WD just went into my don't-trust don't-buy pile.
I actually don't have any non-critical applications. If my mom's laptop hard drive fails, that's still thousands of dollars of my time helping her. It's no less important than enterprise (indeed, I'd argue more, since she doesn't have RAID).
Unfortunately... The competitor(s) you want, no longer exist! Here are some facts.
* Seagate - WD's main competitor - historically didn't have a reputation of high reliability in the industry [0][1]. Its ST3000DM001 [2] drive was terrible enough to have its own Wikipedia article, which is extremely unusual for a hard drive. In terms of reputation of reliability, WD was better, and HGST (Hitachi) had the best.
* Then WD brought HGST. It was kept as an independent operation for a while, since it was required by the regulators. But now it has been fully merged into WD. As parts of the deal, Toshiba received some hard drive assets from WD, thus, Seagate, WD, and Toshiba are the only three hard drive manufacturers, forming a worldwide oligopoly. Wikipedia has a great diagram showing the process of corporate consolidation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Driv...
* Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too [3].
So what can we do? Not much. Buy Toshiba exclusively to make WD and Seagate less powerful? Maybe. But none of them is honest in the SMR affair. Nevertheless, relatively speaking, I do find that WD's denial has made the other two more honest comparatively.
There are quite a few other competitors. They make SSDs. It's a different price/performance curve (lower on the low-end, higher on the high-end), but as I said, reliability trumps all.
In the early days, I waited to adopt SSDs because of horror stories about wear leveling algorithm bugs causing early failures (because SSD makers wanted to eek out a little bit of extra speed). Speed is nice-to-have, but fast, unreliable storage has negative value to me.
On the flip side, if I now can't trust HDDs, I won't buy them. 8TB is nice-to-have, but reliability is critical. 8TB of unreliable storage has negative value to me.
I mean, I was pretty productive in the days of 133MHz computers, 32MB of RAM, and 1.6GB disk space. I prefer gigahertz of multicore performance, 32GB of RAM, and terabytes of disk space, but it's not worth sacrificing reliability for. A computer failure can cost me a week of time.
If it all worked, I'd have a 1TB SSD RAID and an 8TB HDD RAID, each with two drives so if one fails, the other goes on.
That's not just me. A random computer buyer might now know better, but if you buy a computer and something breaks, whoever makes it devalues their brand. If the HDD makers collude to give untrustworthy storage, they won't have a market left.
Unfortunately NAND Flash is not an archival medium, as data can fade in as little as one year when powered off. I realize disk is the new tape, I didn't realize the hard drive makers would take it so literally...
As far as I am concerned, SMR are unfit for any purpose other than hyperscale archival storage. If you work for AWS Glacier, good for you, but those drives should never ever be sold to consumers.
> Unfortunately NAND Flash is not an archival medium, as data can fade in as little as one year when powered off.
A marginally-related comment: Curiously, HDDs are not totally immune to this problem in the long run. Many types of EEPROMs (basically used by everything that has a CPU/MCU inside) only have an officially data retention duration of 10 years, beyond the date, there's no guarantee by the manufacturers that the firmware won't be lost. Yet surprisingly, most consumer electronics work fine after one or two decades, indeed it's because the EEPROM manufacturers are being conservative, not to mention that most electronics are stored room temperature.
There is wild variations of rated lifetime in different microcontrollers, a most common rating is 10 years, but some are 40 years or even 100 years at 25 °C. It indicates that it's related to the semiconductor process, and it also implies EEPROMs have a lot of potential but it's expensive and/or there are too many uncertainties to make any guarantee. How long will today's technology last in the wild is still largely untested in practice.
Long story short, I see EEPROMs as a time bomb of the digital (dark) age. Imagine when a future archeologist wants to download data from a HDD made in 2010, only to find that all firmware and parameters in the EEPROMs are gone, permanently bricking the electronics, even when the platters, motors and the head are good.
Conclusion: In terms of data archiving, SSDs are bad, HDDs are much better and suitable for most people, but tape drives are still the real archival medium.
> Long story short, I see EEPROMs as a time bomb of the digital (dark) age. Imagine when a future archeologist wants to download data from a HDD made in 2010, only to find that all firmware and parameters in the EEPROMs are gone, permanently bricking the electronics, even when the platters, motors and the head are good.
The future remake of Indiana Jones seems way less fun.
M Disc claims to sell DVD-R and BD-R discs that are good for a thousand years. Many modern disc burners support burning to M Discs already. They're a little pricey though.
* Most data is reasonably small, and super-critical. I might have legal documents, personal emails, source code, etc. My business might have basic employee information, or sales transactions. Most of that, efficiently-stored, would fit in a box of 1.44MB floppies.
* I have medium-sized data like photos (product, family, etc).
* I have big data, like videos. A workplace might have surveillance videos, while I might have copies of movies I like, and ISOs of software I bought.
The above is a bit of a obfuscated to not reveal personal information (I took analogies to the types of data I and my business have).
In many cases, it doesn't make sense to have multiple storage locations and to manage all that yourself (management gets too expensive). It's cheaper to keep your big stuff on expensive media than to take time or to hire a software engineer.
At some point, I also start to either discard things explicitly (erase a file), or implicitly (photos/videos with lossy compression). A question is when that happens.
The answer, I think, just moved from "at 8TB, on a WD drive" to "at 1TB, on an SSD."
SSDs configured as RAID in a NAS is the exact opposite of an archival medium. People are concerned about the usecase of "I don't need the data immediately but it shouldn't take several minutes" and SMR completely fails at that.
I fairly recently went 100% SSD on my home build - the price is still high, but over the last year we had some historic NAND price lows - I've got a 1TB NVMe drive for boot/apps/games, a 1TB SATA drive for user profile and another 1TB SATA drive for large file storage.
I used to run 1 SSD + 4 drives in two RAID 1 arrays for this, but with how reliable SSD's have become, and with faster internet allowing for cheap offsite backup, those days are gone.
> There are quite a few other competitors. They make SSDs.
There are some overlaps, but it's a different market. If someone still buys HDDs, certainly it means SSDs are not suitable for the job, at least in term of cost.
> I'll mention cloud storage is a competitor too.
Maybe for cold storage, syncing data and object storage. But still, there is no replacement for a box of spinning hard drives in many applications.
> SSDs are not suitable for the job, at least in term of cost
I think what just happened is that CMR drives just got more expensive, which may erase some of that cost advantage. Not all of it, not yet.
But principle is worth something, too. I expect a few folks who are sortof on the border will be so soured on spinning rust by this whole ordeal, as to swear it off completely.
I think the only difference for most use cases is cost. As soon as the $/byte ratio lines up between SSDs and HDDs the market for HDDs will basically be long term archival storage only I suspect.
My workstation is 100% ssd, but I also have 100TB capacity of network storage, and 100TB of backup storage (about 48% used today) it is not economical for me to use SSD for that
>I'll mention cloud storage is a competitor too.
It is, but today for my home system it cost me about $2-3/TB/MO (maybe less that number is about 3 years old, and drives have dropped in price recently) to build and maintain reliable storage, with backups, that include electricity and amortized capital costs along with replacement hardware every 5-7 years
The absolute cheapest cloud storage out there right now if $5/TB/MO so it getting close, and if drive manufacturer start playing shading games like this that increase the Cost per TB then that might be the tipping point.
Glacier is far more complicated than you might think. It only makes sense in case of disaster recovery where you lost everything including your non glacier backups.
For what it's worth the continued reporting on Blocks & Files at least left me with a better impression of Toshiba than the competition with respect to owning up to it.
When we asked Seagate about the Barracudas and the Desktop HDD using SMR technology, a spokesperson told us: “I confirm all four products listed use SMR technology.”
In a follow-up question, we asked why isn’t this information is not explicit in Seagate’s brochures, data sheets and product manuals – as it is for Exos and Archive disk drives?
Seagate’s spokesperson said: “We provide technical information consistent with the positioning and intended workload for each drive.”
Whereas Toshiba's representative at least cooperated and did not just spout further delusional corporate doublespeak when questioned about the lying.
Blocks & Files asked Toshiba to confirm that the 4TB and 6TB P300 desktop drives use SMR and clarify which drives in its portfolio use SMR.
A company spokesperson told us: “The Toshiba P300 Desktop PC Hard Drive Series includes the P300 4TB and 6TB, which utilise the drive-managed SMR (the base drives are DT02 generation 3.5-inch SMR desktop HDD).
“Models based on our MQ04 2.5-inch mobile generation all utilise drive-managed SMR, and include the L200 Laptop PC Hard Drive Series, 9.5mm 2TB and 7mm 1TB branded models.
“Models based on our DT02 3.5-inch desktop generation all utilise drive managed SMR, and include the 4/6TB models of the P300 Series branded consumer drives.”
The company also told us which other desktop drives did and did not use SMR:
MD07ACA – 7,200rm 12TB, 14TB CMR (base of X300 Performance Hard Drive Series branded models
MD04 – 7,200rpm – 2, 4, 5, 6TB CMR (base for X300 Performance Hard Drive Series branded models
DT02 – 5,400rpm – 4, 6 TB SMR (base for P300 Desktop PC Hard Drive Series 4TB and 6TB branded models)
DT01 – 7, 200rpm – 500GB, 1,2,3 TB CMR (base for P300 Desktop PC Hard Drive Series 1/2/3TB branded models)
And while the use of inferior technology should certainly have been announced in all these cases, watering down the product seems slightly less unforgivable for the class of slow Desktop brand drives, in my perception, as the expectations there shouldn't clash quite as badly with the performance issues.
For what it's worth, I have had 5x Seagate ST3000NV000 drives in a Synology NAS since mid-2014 with zero failures. It's a different model drive (thankfully), but I wanted to put it out there that not all their drives are/have been terrible in my very anecdotal experience.
I have a ST3000DM001 and a ST3000NV000 (and some random WD disk) that, together, make a btrfs filesystem. It's been working perfectly fine for the last four years, and the only problem reported by SMART is on the WD disk. It's always possibly to simply be lucky.
Hitachi drives (not the NAS category) have been at the top of Backblaze’s annual hard drive reliability charts for several years even after the WD acquisition. So that division is still churning out drives that are better than the WD branded drives.
Yah, so they have come somewhat clean about SMR, but they have a lot of other bits they have been hiding. Some of it in plain sight.
"5400 RPM class" which means what exactly?
And of course the whole desktop vs nas differentiation was the early return on error logic being hard coded instead of configurable by the OS/RAID. Remove a feature charge more..
The key thing I want from a drive is reliability. I don't want to lose my data. That far beats size, noise, speed, cost, or just about anything else in what I will shop on. A drive that loses data will cost my thousands of dollars.
My perception of reliability comes down to trust and transparency.If I can't trust a drive maker, I won't buy from them.
WD just went into my don't-trust don't-buy pile.
I actually don't have any non-critical applications. If my mom's laptop hard drive fails, that's still thousands of dollars of my time helping her. It's no less important than enterprise (indeed, I'd argue more, since she doesn't have RAID).