western digital
Staying away from WD NAS drives for now
Western Digital just admitted to Tom’s Hardware that they use a notoriously slow technology, shingled magnetic recording (SMR), in the WD Red drives they market for use in high performance storage devices. This is a very bad look for them.
I just replaced my last 6TB Red with a Seagate IronWolf over the weekend (coincidentally; it had nothing to do with this). In my experience, Reds have a nasty habit in their old age of taking performance nosedives without reporting any SMART errors. Suddenly my storage volume would be slow and pegged at 100% utilization without anything out of the ordinary running, but everything would look OK otherwise. My NAS’s resource monitor would show that all drives are at like 30% utilization, except for a single Red hovering at the top of the graph. The drive would show no errors or really any problems at all, but would be slow as molasses for no apparent reason.
This has happened to me three times now, and each time the fix is to replace the lame duck Red. My storage volume over the weekend was actually faster during the RAID rebuild than it was with the dying drive.
I don’t trust Western Digital’s drives right now, which is a pity because they use to have a great reputation and I loved them.
Negotiations With Western Digital
We bought a Western Digital external hard drive for Jen’s computer while we were in Omaha. I hooked it up when we got home and it was dead on arrival. I called for an RMA (“return material authorization” — basically permission to return it to the manufacturer) and got the replacement a few days later. Unfortunately, they didn’t include a pre-paid shipping label to return the defective part, and the customer service guy wasn’t too keen on giving me one. I wasn’t asking for anything unreasonable or that they just justifiably deny, and here’s how I got one anyway:
CS guy: It’s not our policy to give out shipping labels. It’s the customer’s responsibility to pay for shipping.
Me: It’s not this customer’s policy to pay for shipping products that were dead on arrival.
CS guy: I see your point, but that’s not something we normally do.
Me: OK, but I’d sure appreciate it. I mean, I did you a favor by calling you instead of returning this to the store. I didn’t know I’d have to pay for it.
CS guy: Well, we don’t do a very good job of telling you that on our website. I can ask my supervisor, but I don’t think he’ll do it.
Me: I’ll hold.
[5 minutes go by]
CS guy: Sir, this isn’t something we do, but since these are special circumstances, we’ll do it just this one time. You’ll get it within a week.
Me: Thanks! Oh, and can you extend my deadline for returning the broken one by a few days since I don’t have the shipping label yet?
CS guy: (sighs) Yeah, OK. You can have an extra 10 days.
Note two important things: first, I was polite; second, I was assertive. Failure on either of those would have wrecked the whole deal.