Western Digital’s SMR disks won’t work for ZFS, but they’re okay for most NASes

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-smr-disks-arent-great-but-theyre-not-garbage/

by rbanffy • 6 years ago

90 48 6 years ago

willis936• 6 years ago

Oh my god. No wonder they lied about what technology was in those drives. If customers knew they would never buy it, regardless of price. They should have wrote it off.

Jonnax• 6 years ago

I built a 2 drive 4TB RAID1 with a DS220j using these SMR drives the other day.

To be honest performance is as I'd expect out of a hard drive. But I've mostly been using SSDs on my PCs.

I've put my instrument VSTs on it and I'm using the Windows NFS client (you use cli command to mount after enabling in add windows features)

Standard windows file sharing (SMB) seems to top out at 25MB/s and I've no idea why.

I'm not too worried about it being SMR at least looking at my use case.

But it's really messed up that WD hid the technology used.

If anything it would drive sales for their more expensive products.

Also it does highlight that in a lot of tech product fields we don't have good reviews. Because there's no money in it.

Like with laptops there's notebookcheck doing technical reviews.

With displays rtings and tftcentral.

But with other less used stuff it's a YouTube video from someone saying "yeah it's a harddrive" and reading the marketing.

Or a drive will get reviewed. Then the manufacture will start selling something with the same brand but different model number to confuse customers.

But nobody will re-review, partially because they weren't told.

dannyw5• 6 years ago

Heh, that's almost the same as my setup, except I bought the Seagate Ironwolfs instead on sale. I paid AUD$20 more in total for the Ironwolfs.

I am looking to sell my DS220j however. The lack of support for btrfs is very unfortunate, as a NAS shouldn't be using ext4 with zero integrity measures and zero bit-rot protection in 2020.

RAID1 will not save anything as if there is bitrot, without checksums there is no way to know which copy is correct.

I'm looking to replace the DS220j with the DS220+ when it comes out, which is supposedly in just 1 week based on a local PC shop I called. I also might upgrade to the DS420+ depending on pricing.

ksec• 6 years ago

The lack of support for btrfs is very unfortunate, as a NAS shouldn't be using ext4 with zero integrity measures and zero bit-rot protection in 2020.

Yes. But 220+ is way more expensive than 220J. For Something I expect in 2020 should be standard feature.

And those Ironwolf HDD aren't cheap either. The way things are going Cloud Storage is an increasingly attractive option.

ubercow133• 6 years ago

If you just built your array, you wouldn't encounter this issue yet. The problem would come (assuming you're using ZFS) when your NAS is full of data and one of your disks fails, and you try to replace it with another SMR drive. The drive would be rejected before it could be added to the array.

dannyw5• 6 years ago

As benchmarked in the article, SMR drives rebuild Linux RAID fine because it's just a sequential data overwrite.

The problem occurs when you are dealing with sequential files with small sector sizes, and non-sequential files, where performance is abysmal: 93% slower than CMR as benchmarked by servethehome and Ars.

exikyut• 6 years ago

The drive would be rejected before it could be added to the array.

Wait, what? Why? Because it's too slow?

acqq• 6 years ago

the WD Red's firmware was up to the challenge of handling a conventional RAID rebuild, which amounts to an enormous, very large block sequential write test. (...) the Red is only 16.7 percent slower than its non-SMR Ironwolf competition
we can model an ideal ZFS resilvering workload with a massive sequential write — and we did exactly that, using 32KiB blocks of incompressible pseudorandom data (...) With this test workload, we achieved a throughput of 209.3MiB/sec on the Ironwolf, but only 13.2MiB/sec on the Red — a 15.9:1 slowdown

So if I understood correctly "very large block sequential write test" is only 16% slower, but reducing the size of the written block to 32KiB, like apparently ZFS does, it becomes 16 times slower?

Couldn't that be fixed in ZFS? 32 KiB block is too small for SSDs too, if I understand correctly. (Edit: I refer to: https://tytso.livejournal.com/2009/02/20/ "However, with SSD’s (...) you need to align partitions on at least 128k boundaries for maximum efficiency." -- it seems that 128K was an important number?).

If the writes are sequential, some kind of caching (i.e., blocking the sequential writes) could be made to avoid the slowdown? How big were the blocks written when the 16% slowdown happened?

And what is the minimal needed block size to avoid many-times slowdown?

dannyw5• 6 years ago

You can change the block size with ZFS easily, it is a supported function:

    sudo zfs set recordsize=[size] data/media/series

This can be done at any time, but will only apply to new files.

ZFS is a Copy on Write system, which means that if you take a snapshot (or duplicate) a file and modify one byte, the modifications (min size of a record size) is created then (so 128KiB default). Each block is then distributed reduced to about ~32KiB of writes because of striping, parity, etc.

If you made the record size something large, let's say 1MB, then it would mean that changing 1 byte of a duplicated or snapshotted 1GB file would cause an additional 1MB of storage. Very, very very inefficient. However, still better than a non-CoW system, where duplicates and snapshots would occupy an additional 1GB irrespective of modifications.

So to summarize, ZFS is intentionally designed and benefits from small block sizes, and rather than changing it, you should simply buy a non-SMR drive esp. because they are available at comparable prices.

Also keep in mind that an advanced format HDD sector is 4096 bytes. I haven't heard of any drives with more than ~4096 bytes per sector. So as long as your block size is an integer multiple of 4096 bytes, you are getting all the benefits of your HDD medium.

I believe SSD native sectors are similar, so again, there's not reason to go for huge sectors. SMR's abysmal performance with small sectors is a defect, something you should RMA the moment you receive a SMR drive (WD is honoring replacements, just mention the magic word of 'ZFS rebuild' to support).

RNCTX• 6 years ago

Also keep in mind that an advanced format HDD sector is 4096 bytes. I haven't heard of any drives with more than ~4096 bytes per sector.

There are some NVMEs which are 8192. Not sure which, because, we haven't learned a damn thing in ~15 years.

I distinctly remember back in the 2000s Adaptec giving Theo at OpenBSD a run-around about driver code because they had lawyers in their ear trying to convince them that they should be patent and licensing trolls rather than hardware vendors (worked great for Lucent) and finally, in retaliation, he shipped a version of OpenBSD without Adaptec RAID support.

https://openzfs.org/wiki/Performance_tuning#Alignment_Shift_...

Why is this relevant? Because some of these NVME drives report wrong values for their sector size, so we're still in that same boat of being flat out lied to by the people we buy this hardware from.

Some NVME SSDs, per testing, report 4096 when they're actually 8192. So you don't know what value to use until you set up a pool/dataset, test it for performance, and then if the performance seems off versus say... Anandtech benchmarks, destroy the pool/dataset and try the other value (this becomes ashift=12 or ashift=13 currently).

You can find discussion on the ZFS subreddit about this pretty commonly, and also on the PostGIS and OpenStreetMap user groups and github issue forums since those people tend to be on the bleeding edge of the disk performance market.

zozbot2342• 6 years ago

I believe SSD native sectors are similar, so again, there's not reason to go for huge sectors.

SSD "erase" operations involve fairly large sectors but these are something you'd want to limit anyway, for the sake of data resilience. So using small sectors for SSD's may make sense too.

secabeen• 6 years ago

If you made the record size something large, let's say 1MB, then it would mean that changing 1 byte of a duplicated or snapshotted 1GB file would cause an additional 1MB of storage. Very, very very inefficient. However, still better than a non-CoW system, where duplicates and snapshots would occupy an additional 1GB irrespective of modifications.

1MB recordsizes make a lot of sense for drives that primarily hold large files for archive or preservation. That lines up with the intended use of SMR drives. The problem here is that these were stealth-SMR drives, saving WD money at the customer's pain.

For the small % of use cases where you have large files that are written sequentially, and never edited internally, labeled-SMR with large records can be a good solution that saves money.

fredsanford• 6 years ago

This article makes me wonder how much WD paid...

Since they hid the change to SMR, what else has been hidden?

donmcronald• 6 years ago

Paid for what, the article? The author has been around the ZFS community for a long time and helps tons of people (including me) for free. He’s not schilling for WD if that’s what you’re suggesting.

dannyw5• 6 years ago

There is no evidence of anything like that, and you can even reproduce the results yourself.

Dodgy relationships between companies and journalists in tech are not unheard of, but they need evidence.

Eric_WVGG• 6 years ago

… how much WD paid for an article that makes them look like shit? What sort of stuff do you pay people to write about you?

rbanffy2• 6 years ago

Does anyone know the size of the non-SMR data area on the disk? I assume that's the size of a sequential write before the performance drops to a halt while writing all that to SMR. Also, random writes would perform much worse if they require multiple SMR blocks to be read and rewritten each time the non-SMR area fills up.

Perhaps a good analog for an SMR drive would be some of the early hierarchical storage servers that served data from RAM, then from spinning metal, and then from either tape or optical disks, each being slower than the previous. You could get fast writes until the RAM was full, then slower, disk-like writes while the HDs were getting filled, then excruciatingly slow throughput when you needed to hit the MO drives with little RAM or disk storage to help you.

insulanus• 6 years ago

It's not like the disk is divided into SMR and non-SMR zones. Adjacent tracks that already contain data must always be re-written. So, these driveswork well if managed in one of two ways:

* Append-only * Only use every other track

If used like that, they can be considered just another hard drive, with an unusually large gap between tracks.

But if you try to pack on as much data as the drive will hold, and then modify parts in the middle, the drive is going to have a bad time.

rbanffy2• 6 years ago

That's not what's described in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording

dnr• 6 years ago

The drive firmware and layout are more sophisticated than you're imagining: All SMR drives have some non-SMR (CMR) zones for buffering and metadata. For the archival drives I was looking at a while ago (host-managed), it was usually 1% or 0.5% of the total. I would imagine these stealth-drive-managed ones have even more, maybe a few percent, to allow more buffering and hide the cost of shuffling data.

Stranger43• 6 years ago

Now you could turn the argument around and ask if ZFS is at all appropriate for consumer/small office NAS systems.

There is an argument to be made that ZFS might be getting a bit to much hype as the future of mass market storage given how dependent it seems to be on the hardware being "perfect".

growse• 6 years ago

Having suffered from silent data corruption affecting some old photos that I only noticed years after it had happened (backups going back that far had already been purged), I'd argue that ZFS is appropriate for everyone who cares about their data.

Given that ZFS will happily run on pretty much anything, I think the bar for hardware dependency is slightly lower than "perfect" and somewhere around "not completely crap".

xmodem• 6 years ago

"Perfect" and "assuming hardware won't perform in some pathological way unaccounted for at development time" aren't the same thing.

brokenmachine• 6 years ago

Yes, it's clearly ZFS' fault that WD lied about their drives and made them run 16x slower than previous years models under use cases that they were expressly advertised as being suitable for.

derekp7• 6 years ago

Question about SMR drives. From my understanding, essentially at the low level they have to modify data in much larger block sizes -- so if you are modifying a small amount of data, a block has to be read in, modified, then written out. Unless the block is known to contain no data after the point where the write occurs (such as sequential writes).

What is the size of these blocks? And if the problems occur during raid rebuild, aren't the rebuilds writing data sequentially?

karmakaze• 6 years ago

This all happens at the hardware level, so every block has data--every write has to write two tracks as I understand it.

mindslight• 6 years ago

Nobody is saying that you can't use an SMR drive in a RAID with the appropriate write strategy. It's just that you'd expect those tweaks to be enabled when the drive actually reports itself as an SMR drive. Which these drives don't do, because WD tried to defraud their customers by doing a gross cost+feature reduction on a product line that had been shipping for many years.

StillBored3• 6 years ago

Until WD published a worse case write timeout on these drives, and gets it merged into linux/etc I would claim they aren't fit for any purpose because your just crossing your fingers and hoping your write pattern is ok.

They are still hiding fundamental parameters needed to make these drives work properly (number/size of SMR regions, how much CMR is available, and ways to read the percentage the cache+CMR is full at any given time).

zenexer2• 6 years ago

Current title is "Western Digital’s SMR disks won’t work for ZFS, but they’re okay for most NASes." That isn't the title of the article (it's the subtitle) and doesn't match the conclusion:

Conclusions
We want to be very clear: we agree with Seagate's Greg Belloni, who stated on the company's behalf that they "do not recommend SMR for NAS applications." At absolute best, SMR disks underperform significantly in comparison to CMR disks; at their worst, they can fall flat on their face so badly that they may be mistakenly detected as failed hardware.

That's definitely not saying it's "okay for most NASes." Could we get a rename? It looks like Ars Technica themselves might be going back and forth; the current URL contains the slug, "western-digitals-smr-disks-arent-great-but-theyre-not-garbage," indicating that may have been the old title.

oefrha• 6 years ago

Ars Technica publishes every article with two titles; there’s an A/B test in the first few minutes after an article is published, after which the one with better click-through rate becomes the permanent title. Obviously only one of the two titles can be the slug, so often the slug reflects the title that has lost. That does not indicate going back and forth.

Source: it’s a well-known fact that editors have disclosed many times over. Also, as a subscriber I often see a different title in my RSS feed.

fragmede• 6 years ago

Here's a more detailed discussion from Ars on their A/B testing of headlines that I found:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/tfw-a...

zenexer2• 6 years ago

What's more important here is that the title doesn't match the conclusion. (That being said, it's kind of cool that they A/B test all their titles like that--thanks for the info!)

e40• 6 years ago

I had two failures on a RAID 6 in the same week. All 3TB WD Red's. I'm slowly replacing all of the drives with Seagate 4TB NAS drives. I definitely do not trust these drives.

And, I had had failures of some of the drives before, but when I pulled them and did extensive tests of them, they were always OK.

StillBored3• 6 years ago

I'm betting its possible if your drives are sufficiently fragmented and you start a heavy write workload that shotguns sectors all over the disk from multiple TCQs the default write command timeouts on most RAID systems aren't sufficiently long.

So the drive may not have failed, the RAID just determined that the command was taking to long, fired a reset at the drive and when it didn't immediately respond marked it bad.

013a• 6 years ago

Maybe this is mentioned somewhere in the article, I haven't read the whole thing, but its important to elaborate: SMR is only in-place on WD Red drives between 2TB-6TB [1]. Everything smaller and larger than that uses CMR, and SMR isn't used on any other 3.5" drives beyond their budget "blue" drives. This is now cross-elaborated on their Amazon (US) istings; their 2TB-6TB Red drives are in a totally different product listing [2] which says "SMR" in the title (versus their CMR drives [3])

I don't like that they hid it. If they want to keep SMR around for their 2-6TB Red variants, I think they should reclassify those drives with another "color" and not certify them for server applications (WD Pink?)

[1] https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Red-4TB-Internal-Hard-Drive/dp/B07MYL...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Red-12TB-Internal-Hard-Drive/dp/B07RQ...

colejohnson66• 6 years ago

What I don’t understand is: SMR is for increased density, no? So, why don’t the 8 TB Reds use it?

alias_neo• 6 years ago

To take a guess, I'd say they managed to remove a platter or two to lower costs on the smaller drives (I wonder if an EFAX is physically lighter?) but couldn't get the same benefit or didn't need the cost reduction in the more expensive 8TB+ drives. It's also possible that in testing, the 256MB cache just want sufficient to make DM-SMR "usable" at those larger capacities or that the firmware/controller just wasn't up to it.

dehrmann• 6 years ago

Except for the uberblocks (which will definitely have a problem with SMR), shouldn't SMR be fine for ZFS because it's copy-on-wirte?

blackflame70002• 6 years ago

The whole point of ZFS is to tolerate bad drives. You could run ZFS on green drives if you want. (but don't count on high performance).

Western Digital’s SMR disks won’t work for ZFS, but they’re okay for most NASes

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