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

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You will see the family name (Giant or Apollo), number of heads (8 or 6), capacity, RPM, SATA link rate. Write tests tell a mostly similar story. As an individual drive, the WD40EFAX is performing pretty well in these benchmarks. PCMark8 Benchmark 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. The RAID rebuild problem you refer to is a peculiarity of ZFS. It does not occur in Hardware Based RAID and it does not occur in Windows RAID or Storage Spaces. It does not occur in other Software Defined Storage solutions.

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? This is a a great article. Ektich we load test every drive before we replace them in customer systems to ensure we aren’t using a faulty drive. You don’t test a drive before putting it into a rebuild scenario? That’s terrible practice. You don’t need to do it with CMR drives either. CMR was tested in the same way so I don’t see how its a bad test. Even with a cache flush they’re hitting steady state because of the rebuild. Their insight into the drive being used while doing the rebuild is great too. Both models are relatively silent compared to WD Blue or others, but you can tell the difference between the two reds above. Would be worthwhile to at least update the following articles with a warning to avoid SMR HDDs when using ZFS: 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.this temperature difference is not normal… but a NAS usually has a small fan so it’s quite possible that they are not getting the same amount of fresh air 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 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 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.

is usually the limit of most electronic components but that doesn’t mean a HDD should go up so high. 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. I bought 2 WD40EFRX-68WT0N0 3 years ago. 1 failed after 2,5 months. RMAed. Got another WD40EFRX-68WT0N0. The RMAed one lived nearly 2 years and failed again. RMAed again and this time I got WD40EFRX-68N32N0 - purportedly the newer one. This time I bought additional warranty so I should have 5 years of peace if it fails. Granted! To get the more accurate results I could swap the drivers slots and perform the comparison again. However, given that before I already had 4x 68WT0N0 drivers located on the same exact slots and the HDD temperature was quite high even then, I can conclude that the temperature difference is not caused by different HDD slot, air etc.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. 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.

Great article as always. 🙂 Great to see some hard facts related to this after reading about it from others. Someone said this is part of a RACE for BIGGER capacities. It can be… BUT, before that happens, WD is probably using the most demanding customers / environments to TEST SMR tech so they can DEPLOY them in the bigger capacity DRIVES: 8, 10, 12, 14TB and beyond (do not currently exist). I say this because, WD has the same “infected SMR drives” using the well known PMR tech! https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-red-hdd/data-sheet-western-digital-wd-red-hdd-2879-800002.pdf In read tests the SMR drive performs fairly similarly to the CMR based WD40EFRX. HDTune Write BenchmarkThen I found out about this lawsuit. And upon further investigation I found out that these disks are SMR. I filed a support request with Seagate. Dear Western Digital, you thought you could get away with it because a basic benchmark does not show much difference OR you were not even aware of the issue because you did not test them with RAID. Duplicity or lazy indifference or both? On top of which you badly tried to cover it up before finally facing it up.

AFAIK, the SMR Reds support the TRIM command. I wonder to what extent can performance be regained with its use. Also, if you trim the entire disk (and maybe wait a little), does it return to initial performance? Has anyone tested this?

In PCMark8, the WD40EFAX manages to outperform the CMR WD40EFRX. The SMR drive has a much larger cache than the CMR version, 256MB vs 64MB, which perhaps helps account for the win here. In these kinds of shorter burst activity workloads, one can see how SMR may be used as a substitute. First up is the file copy test. Just a reminder, this test was performed as immediately as possible after completing the drive preparation process. File Copy Test I knew of the WD SMR scandal. Fortunately, I have four of the WD40EFRZ CMR models, so breathed a sigh of relief. However, WD have gotten off incredibly lightly here. They marketed their Red range as NAS drives, all of them, not just those they knew were CMR. That’s completely unacceptable and the fact they weren’t forced to change those SMR Red’s to Blue or Blue Plus or something, is outrageous.