We want to thank our customers and partners for your feedback on our WD Red family of network attached storage (NAS) hard drives. Your real-world insights shared through in-depth reviews, blogs, forum... WD Shares a Few more words on WD RED NAS Drives
Funny that they mention the WD60EFRX and other EFRX models as new, when they are not. I have two of them already here for years, one of which just failed last week leaving me with a 6000GB data loss. Also the ones i have are labelled as WD60PURX Purple Surveillance drives even though they are actually WD60EFRX according to drive utilities.
This whole thing has been a mess. Any word on how pricing will work? A price hike for Plus just to ensure you're not getting SMR would be bogus. Glad I ended up with EFRX's for my NAS and not EFAX's, I wasn't looking forward to the hassle of backing up and building a new array.
It's funny--I used to live and die by Western Digital drives. You might even say I used to plan builds around Blacks since they tend to get nice and toasty. But I think I've been letting too many things slide with them over the years--Green drives with abysmal failure rates due to super aggressive (8 seconds) head parking, the fact their Red drives are nearly identical to Green drives with head parking disabled and sold at a premium, and even the confusion caused by rebranding their 1TB+ Blue drives into Green. So many things they've done to subvert loyal customers, in an industry that is slowly transitioning to SSD's. The decision to leave Western Digital products behind seemed logical, if not inevitable.
it is funny how an old or more conventional technology just turns in a PLUS, i suppose it will be a plus in price also. At least people will know a little better what they are buying
can only imagine how tiring this non ending cycle of companies getting fat & incompetent & exploitative must be for older folks that have been seeing this for more than I've been alive they all act the same even, almost as if the whole company was a marketing team
Ah, yes. I remember changing the stupid head parking delay value to the maximum allowed. It was nothing but a planned obsolescence trick from WD.
On other hand below 8 To i would not buy a HDD... I like the "We listen to you... but we don't care... It's consumer who make the mistake"... i guess this guy have made the same communication school than the french president, lol. Sadly SMR have not issue with other brand (seagate archive and barracuda serie), and also none other brand use SMR for NAS disk, just for that 2 points i keep thinking that WD have made a huge mistake and try to drown the fish in water...
I see parallels with the airline industry... We had a bottom. We need new bottom with smaller seats in-between rows. We cram more peeps. We have new bottom.
So WD is essentially doubling down on SMR for consumer NAS drives, and introducing a higher priced "Plus" tier for what had traditionally been standard consumer NAS tier, wow... Meanwhile Seagate has been slashing prices on their EXOS entreprise drives even lower than their Ironwolf consumer NAS drives. Curious to see where this will all settles. Yup, they are purposefully lowering the bar for consumer NAS drives and upselling a "Plus" branding and increasing their profits.
From what I understand I think price will remain the same. For me it looks more like they just tend to eliminate confusion by changing the brands. There has been a lot of complaints regarding their SMR technology being sold as "NAS" drives due to several issues. So in theory, this name-change is a smart move, however of course I cannot say for sure that price will remain the same but I don't see any reason for that right now.
WD is full of crap by saying SMR is on par with CMR which is obviously WRONG as tested by other users. If they were on par with CMR drives then users wouldn't have had issues with their ZFS storage sever setups. Plus a slightly longer RAID rebuild time that is understatement if I have ever heard of one. I watched Linus' video on this and he said it took some users like 1-3 days for a RAID on a SMR drive to rebuild. That is totally unacceptable. I hope that this class-action lawsuit gets underway and it makes WD realize that they are full of crap and they should fix it instead of just apologizing. Also tech users can see through WD's lies and misinformation here.