Western Digital 4TB Intellipower SATA 6Gb/s 64 MB Cache 3.5-Inch NAS Desktop Hard Disk Drive - Red (WD40EFAX)

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The only positive here is that the resilver did finish, and encountered no errors along the way, but the performance operating in the RAIDZ array was completely unacceptable. That 9 day and almost 14-hour rebuild means that using the WD Red 4TB SMR drive inadvertently in an array would lead to your data being vulnerable for around 9 days longer than the WD Red 4TB CMR drive or Seagate IronWolf. If you use WD Red CMR drives, you had class-leading performance in this test but if you bought a WD Red SMR drive, perhaps not understanding the difference, you would have another 9 days of potentially catastrophic data vulnerability. I generally tell people RAID arrays tend to operate at the speed of their slowest part. If you mix drives, the slower ones tend to dictate performance more times than not.

WD Red hard drives and SSDs have been compatibility-tested by major NAS system providers with their NAS systems and components.Robert – I generally look for low-cost CMR drives, and expect that they will fail on me. While I expect the drive failures, I also look for a predictable level of performance during operation and rebuilds. In both cases, the WD Red SMR drives would not work for me personally. I will also say that a likely part of the problem here is that these are DM-SMR drives that hide the fact they are SMR from the host. SMR drive support is getting better when hosts know they are using SMR drives.

As an industry-leading hard drive manufacturer, Western Digital stands behind their NAS storage solutions with the assurance of a 3-year limited warranty and world-class support services for hassle free data storage. 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 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. However, the WD40EFAX is not a consumer desktop-focused drive. Instead, it is a WD Red drive with NAS branding all over it. When that NAS readiness was put to the test the drive performed spectacularly badly. The RAIDZ results were so poor that, in my mind, they overshadow the otherwise decent performance of the drive. 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.

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. 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. In read tests the SMR drive performs fairly similarly to the CMR based WD40EFRX. HDTune Write Benchmark You don't have permission to access /content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-red-plus-hdd/product-brief-western-digital-wd-red-plus-hdd.pdf 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.

First up is the file copy test. Just a reminder, this test was performed as immediately as possible after completing the drive preparation process. File Copy Test

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Would be worthwhile to at least update the following articles with a warning to avoid SMR HDDs when using ZFS: 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 biggest advantage of the Red SATA III drives is the fact that they have been specially developed for use in smaller NAS systems. Theoretically, these also work with normal desktop hard drives, whereby an algorithm should always determine the best possible relationship between reliability and transmission performance. For NAS and RAID environments, the manufacturer has designed these drives in such a way that they should last for many years even in continuous operation. RAID error recovery protocols also reduce the risk of failure. The MTBF is specified as up to one million hours of continuous operation. Ultimately, the Western Digital Red SATA III with NCQ support is a much more professional solution for 24-hour continuous operation than classic desktop and notebook hard drives, which of course were not designed and tested for these conditions. Available in Different Memory Capacities