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
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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?