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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. 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
As you can see, with a heavy write workload immediately preceding the CDM test, the SMR drive was notably slower. In some ways, this is like timing a runner’s sprint time after running a marathon. One could argue that you may not transfer 125GB files every day, but that is less data than the video production folder for this article’s companion video we linked at the start. Still, this is a good indicator of the drive working through its internal data management processes and impacting performance. If people can sue Apple for advertising a phone has 16GB of storage when some of that is taken up by the operating system, those two missing words may make a huge different in the legal circus. 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. According to iXsystems, WD Red SMR drives running firmware revision 82.00A82 can cause the drive to enter a failed state during heavy loads using ZFS. This is the revision of firmware that came on both of our drives. We did not experience this failure mode, and instead only received extremely poor performance. Perhaps that was because we were testing the use of the drive as a replacement rather than building an entire array of SMR drives. In either case, we suggest not using them.We are going to start with some general benchmarks to try and place the WD Red (WD40EFAX) performance in a larger context. HDTune Read Benchmark Next, we will move on to the tests focused on the WD40EFAX and NAS RAID arrays. WD Red SMR v. CMR Part II: The Not So Good Few of them are SMR and other are CMR drives. You can identify them here https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/
The 68WT0N0 has 4 x 1TB platters and 8 heads. It is a heavy drive at about 700g. I’ve also personally had RMAs involving this model, but of course WD would never admit to a systemic issue. I am running a 6×2.5″ 500GB RAID10 array for a total of 3TB for my Steam library. The drives are Seagate Barracuda ST500LM050 drives from the same or similar batch. The drives perform terrible ever since day 1, causing the whole PC to appear unresponsive for minutes the moment 1 file in the Steam library is rewritten for game updates. Things get worse when Steam needs to preallocate storage space for new games, often I have to leave the machine alone for two to three hours. I already changed motherboard once because I thought it was a motherboard issue. Even with a new motherboard the problem persisted.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. 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 These new drives seem to be an upgraded version of their older CMR drives that used the same recording technology. When they silently replaced CMR with SMR drives they had more cache available. Now they have matched the cache size with their SMR drives. In a RAID situation, you will not benefit from this cache since all data is written randomly across many drives. But it is interesting that their speed has been increased from around 150 to 170 MB/s. If you have older drives that are slower you will not benefit from this. But if you have a new NAS then certainly choosing these faster drives would theoretically improve NAS speeds. In the existing setup, the speed will be as fast as the slowest link in the chain. If you connect via 1GbE LAN then you will not notice a speed difference anyway. So, if anyone needs to know WHAT INTERNAL DRIVE MODEL they have in their WD EXTERNAL ENCLOSURES, install https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo and COPY PAST the info to the clipboard! (EDIT -> COPY or CTRL-C). Paste it to a text editor, and voila!!!
Join the Inner Circle? The Inner Circle is a community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about the same things you are. You’ll have the opportunity to ask questions and get replies from me and other Inner Circle members who are dedicated to helping each other out.Robert, that video is very hard to follow. They are using smaller capacity drives with different NAS systems. They are also not doing a realistic test since it seems they are not putting a workload on the NAS during rebuilds? The ability to keep systems running and maintaining operations is a key feature of NAS/ RAID systems. It is strange not to at least generate some workload during a rebuild. I am in the looking to replace my WD Red 3TB drives with WD Red Plus 6TB drives (making sure CMR tech is used). Now i noticed that a new WD Red Plus line has entered the market in 2021, namely the EFZX series with 128mb cache instead of 64mb cache currently used by the EFRX series.
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