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

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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. 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!!! 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.

Compatibility: Unlike desktop drives, WD Red hard drives are specifically designed and tested for NAS and include NASware™ technology which fine tunes drive parameters to match NAS system workloads for optimum performance. 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. 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/When it comes to data recovery one of the most common problems Western Digital WD40EFRX Hard Disk Drive experience is burnt circuit board(PCB). So if you will need to match a replacement PCB, it is important that you note the “ Board Number” of your current circuit board in addition to the hard drive’s “ Model Number“. 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

Why is that? Why keep SMR and PMR drives with the SAME capacity in the same line and HIDING this info from customers? So they can target “specific” markets with the SMR drives? It seems like a marketing TEST!!! How BIG is it?

Western Digital Red SATA III

In the file copy test, the effects of the slower SMR technology starts to show itself a bit. The WD40EFAX turns in performance numbers that are significantly worse than the CMR drives.

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.

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https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/western-digital-gets-sued-for-sneaking-smr-disks-into-its-nas-channel/ RAID Ready: WD Red hard drives are engineered with RAID error recovery control to help reduce failures within multi-bay NAS systems, unlike most desktop drives that are configured for generic use. 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. ABOUT USServeTheHome is the IT professional's guide to servers, storage, networking, and high-end workstation hardware, plus great open source projects. WD Red hard drives and SSDs have been compatibility-tested by major NAS system providers with their NAS systems and components.