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.
This is basically standard practice among the SSD industry. SSD manufacturers are allowed to get away with this because they post vague or misleading data sheets about their product, such as stating "up to X" speeds or lowballing their speeds in the data sheet so that when reviewers review the product, they see that their product exceeds the expectations laid out in their data sheet and get praised in return, and down the line they swap out parts with inferior ones that still meet the specifications within their data sheet. It is absolute bullshit, but almost every SSD manufacturer I can think of has been recorded doing this at this point. I believe SK Hynix might still be honest, but I could be forgetting something.
The thing is, Samsung did this with some of their drives too, but they were very upfront about it despite the performance hit not being so bad. WD's solution to everything seems to be to say nothing and hope people won't notice.
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.
This is basically standard practice among the SSD industry. SSD manufacturers are allowed to get away with this because they post vague or misleading data sheets about their product, such as stating "up to X" speeds or lowballing their speeds in the data sheet so that when reviewers review the product, they see that their product exceeds the expectations laid out in their data sheet and get praised in return, and down the line they swap out parts with inferior ones that still meet the specifications within their data sheet. It is absolute bullshit, but almost every SSD manufacturer I can think of has been recorded doing this at this point. I believe SK Hynix might still be honest, but I could be forgetting something.
The thing is, Samsung did this with some of their drives too, but they were very upfront about it despite the performance hit not being so bad. WD's solution to everything seems to be to say nothing and hope people won't notice.
Not surprising. Western Digital drives are known to be garbage, I'm surprised people still even buy them.