So I posted not too long ago that I had a drive failure in my RaidZ pool. Ordered a replacement disk (WD RED, purpose built for NAS), and tried resilvering only to see this after a short while…
https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/10214 https://www.truenas.com/docs/hardware/notices/componentarticles/wdsmr/ https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/
Turns out WD started pushing out a new disk technology called SMR, that’s slower, and fails when rebuilding RAIDs due to heavy write operations, and specifically marketed it towards NAS users? WTF Western Digital?!
Anyway, disk RMAd, and a replacement CMR disk is on the way. I’ll never buy WD drives again… Lesson learned the hard way.
Daily reminder that Seagate drives have the highest failure rate and the lowest failure rate of any CMR drive and that WD drives have about 1/2 of the failure rate on average as Seagate drives: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/331241-backblaze-publishes-stats-for-hard-drive-failure-in-2021
In fact, almost all Ironwolf drives above 10 TB had ridiculous failure rates within the first year or two: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/hdds-typically-fail-in-under-3-years-backblaze-study-of-17155-drives-finds/
Both WD and Seagate are fine if you do your research into what models are good and bad. For example, get your hand on this Seagate Exos: ST8000NM000A or a WD Ultrastar WUH721816ALE6L4 and you apparently will have a 0% failure rate over 10 years lol.
No brand is overall great. There are great ironwolfs and shit ironwolfs that could fail in the first year. Just like there are shit WD reds (regular reds with shit SMR) and good WD reds (most plus/pros).
Brand loyalty is the stupidest investment a person can make.