On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 1:16 PM Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 2:29 PM Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I've used the WD Reds and WD Golds (no not sold) and never had any
problem.
> >
>
> Up until a few weeks ago I would have advised the same, but WD was
> just caught shipping unadvertised SMR in WD Red disks.  This is going
> to at the very least impact your performance if you do a lot of
> writes, and it can be incompatible with rebuilds in particular with
> some RAID implementations.  Seagate and Toshiba have also been quietly
> using it but not in their NAS-labeled drives and not as extensively in
> general.

I read somewhere that they knew they'd been caught and were coming clean.
As I'm not buying anything at this time I didn't pay too much attention.

This link is at least similar to what I read earlier. Possibly it's of
interest.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/309730-western-digital-comes-clean-shares-which-hard-drives-use-smr

Another case of unbridled capitalism and consumers being hurt.

Cheers,
Mark