Seagate, Toshiba and WD all secretly selling SMR-based HDDs

Blocks & Files exposes that all big HDD makers are secretly selling shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs. First, the site revealed that various new WD Red NAS are now SMR-based, a fact that's not disclosed to customers. SMR HDDs aren't popular among enthusiasts as they have much worse random write performance than PMR-based disks.

Alan Brown, a network manager at UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory, the UK’s largest university-based space research group, told us about his problems adding a new WD Red NAS drive to a RAID array at his home. Although it was sold as a RAID drive, the device “keep[s] getting kicked out of RAID arrays due to errors during resilvering,” he said.

Unfortunately, it isn't just WD. After posting the first article, Blocks & Files discovered that Seagate is also secretly selling Barracuda and Desktop HDDs with SMR:

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.”

After further digging, Blocks & Files found out that Toshiba is also selling SMR-based disks without mentioning this in end-user documentation. (Update: Toshiba issued a list of which of its HDDs 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.”

So there you have it. Adjust your buying decisions accordingly.