They did something similar a couple years ago with their WD Red hard drive line. Swapped in SMR drives. I don't think the issue is that SMR is necessarily a bad thing, unless you're running certain types of multi drive RAID. The issue being the Red line is specifically marketed for NAS and more expensive, and a NAS is one of the most likely places you'd be doing RAID. I believe they got sued over it.
Yup, and they actually introduced a new line of CMR Red drives (Plus) because of the blowback. If they were smart they would have introduced a whole new line for non-raid DAS drives and put the SMR drives under that label and just raised the price on the Red drives.
I hoped they had learned something from that, but apparently not.
They did something similar a couple years ago with their WD Red hard drive line. Swapped in SMR drives. I don't think the issue is that SMR is necessarily a bad thing, unless you're running certain types of multi drive RAID. The issue being the Red line is specifically marketed for NAS and more expensive, and a NAS is one of the most likely places you'd be doing RAID. I believe they got sued over it.
Yup, and they actually introduced a new line of CMR Red drives (Plus) because of the blowback. If they were smart they would have introduced a whole new line for non-raid DAS drives and put the SMR drives under that label and just raised the price on the Red drives.
I hoped they had learned something from that, but apparently not.