WD SMR Drive Issues

This cluster focuses on reliability problems with Western Digital hard drives, especially undisclosed SMR technology in CMR-labeled products causing failures and lawsuits, with users comparing WD to HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, and others using Backblaze stats and personal experiences.

➡️ Stable 0.8x Hardware
3,217
Comments
19
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#9371
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2008
6
2009
28
2010
39
2011
72
2012
63
2013
93
2014
163
2015
134
2016
168
2017
139
2018
77
2019
113
2020
598
2021
386
2022
204
2023
333
2024
191
2025
405
2026
5

Keywords

SanDisk ENTIRE INCLUDING QUALITY WITH DO EFFORT e.g PERFORMANCE BASIS drives drive buy backblaze bought western luck controller synology consumer

Sample Comments

jmnicolas Feb 11, 2020 View on HN

Any particular reason they don't use Western Digital drives ?

Melatonic Jun 22, 2022 View on HN

Might be temporary? How about if you look at different drives like seagate enterprise or HGST or Toshiba?

dotancohen May 10, 2023 View on HN

You bought a Western Digital drive too, eh?

jbverschoor May 19, 2025 View on HN

Curious to see what WD / SanDisk has to say about this

muro Feb 15, 2024 View on HN

Could be Seagate and SanDisk too ...

whizzter Oct 17, 2025 View on HN

Ugh, that's sad. The 10 year old drives for me are WD:RED's so can't complain about the old ones.Looking at the Pro/Plus PDF's it seems that they do specify CMR officially so sneaking in SMR disks sounds like lawsuit material.I'll probably go for them again, just be vary with research!

anonymars Nov 27, 2025 View on HN

Maybe, maybe not?https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/wd-launches-...

justsomehnguy Aug 19, 2023 View on HN

Be warned - all SATA drives there are SMR.

tfigment Apr 15, 2020 View on HN

You are not wrong and I knew better but I was build for first time and bought all at same time. Now it's a mix of HGST, WD, Toshiba. Some are 34000h, with no issues. The WD is slower when data scrubbing but I don't trust WD for many years and that one was because other vendors were out of that size. I don't really know who to trust in that space any more so it's Toshiba for me on any new replacements.

batmaniam Apr 21, 2023 View on HN

Good info, but just double checking... HGST is different than Seagate drives right? Or did Seagate buy HGST and now they are crap too?