Avoiding secretly shingled drives

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jpoc

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#272240 16-Jun-2020 09:53

I guess that I am not the only person to have hit the problem of secret-shingles on large hard drives.

For those who do not know, recently it turned out that some hard disk manufacturers have been selling drives using shingle technology without disclosing this.

Seagate Barracuda and Western Digital Red drives are included in this list but there are probably more drives and brands involved than this. (Some drives in those ranges are non-shingled but others are affected.)

This is a real problem for anyone inadvertently picking up such drives for use in systems such as RAID, ZFS or BTRFS.

So,what do you do if you need to buy new drives now?

It seems likely that there are going to be class action lawsuits against drive manufacturers and I expect one outcome of that will be that the defendant manufacturers will make some pledge never again to misdescribe products like this.

Until then, how does anyone know what are the safe options to purchase? I have seen some websites offering lists but they seem far from complete.

Are there any safe manufacturers or technologies? Is it safe to stick to SAS drives rather than SATA if you have the choice?

Any ideas?

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#2505614 16-Jun-2020 10:00

WD is documenting CMR/SMR on the spec pages, e.g. https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-hdd

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lokhor

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#2505616 16-Jun-2020 10:03

From reading I believe the larger capacity 8TB+ drives are not using SMR

All comments are my own opinion, and not that of my employer unless explicitly stated.

frankv

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#2505625 16-Jun-2020 10:08

Surely nowadays you would use a SSD for your volatile data? And only use a magnetic disk for backups or bulk data that is rarely overwritten (e.g. video or music archives)?

jpoc

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#2505637 16-Jun-2020 10:22

lokhor:

From reading I believe the larger capacity 8TB+ drives are not using SMR

I have a pair of 8TB Barracudas which are shingled.

Also, a few WD Reds.

jpoc

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#2505643 16-Jun-2020 10:27

frankv:

Surely nowadays you would use a SSD for your volatile data? And only use a magnetic disk for backups or bulk data that is rarely overwritten (e.g. video or music archives)?

My bulk data is on a ZFS system. One Shingled drive can poison the whole array.

One such drive does not cause data loss but every time I to try to scrub the array, the system restarts the scrub when the shingled drives goes quite for twenty seconds or so.

Lias

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#2505656 16-Jun-2020 11:09

frankv:

Surely nowadays you would use a SSD for your volatile data? And only use a magnetic disk for backups or bulk data that is rarely overwritten (e.g. video or music archives)?

If you want to pay to replace my home storage server's drives with SSD's, be my guest..

My guess is you could probably buy a house in an out of the way town for what it would cost.

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Mark

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#2505714 16-Jun-2020 13:18

A reasonable rule of thumb for if a drive is shingled or not, is the amount of cache on the drive ... 256MB+ is a good sign it's a shingled drive.

allan

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#2505776 16-Jun-2020 14:41

For Seagate drives, there are a number of statements online indicating that the Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro ranges are not shingled.

kiwifidget

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#2505777 16-Jun-2020 14:45

Pardon my ignorance, what is a shingled drive and why is that bad?

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Gordy7

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#2505781 16-Jun-2020 15:01

It is hardly new HDD technology... If the MTBF is good, Shingled HDDs should be ok...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording

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jpoc

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#2505843 16-Jun-2020 15:32

Gordy7:

It is hardly new HDD technology... If the MTBF is good, Shingled HDDs should be ok...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording

Not for something that uses some form of raid.

To quote from that wiki article:

"RAID resilvering tends to overload the cache, sending SMR drives into minutes-long pauses."

The raid system, whether hardware or software will assume that a drive that does not respond for several minutes has failed. The drive will be logically kicked out of the raid and you start to lose data redundancy.

jpoc

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#2505846 16-Jun-2020 15:33

Mark:

A reasonable rule of thumb for if a drive is shingled or not, is the amount of cache on the drive ... 256MB+ is a good sign it's a shingled drive.

That statement is believed to be good for certain models of WD Red drives. Unfortunately it is not a blanket rule.

jpoc

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#2505850 16-Jun-2020 15:37

allan:

For Seagate drives, there are a number of statements online indicating that the Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro ranges are not shingled.

Do you know if those statements are from third parties who have been able to test drives to determine whether or not they are shingled or if they are statements from a manufacturer which has been caught deceiving customers over a period of years about which drives are shingled?

jpoc

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#2505856 16-Jun-2020 15:44

kiwifidget:

Pardon my ignorance, what is a shingled drive and why is that bad?

This article answers both of your questions.

https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/shingled-drives-have-non-shingled-zones-for-caching-writes/

allan

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#2505917 16-Jun-2020 16:10

jpoc:

allan:

For Seagate drives, there are a number of statements online indicating that the Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro ranges are not shingled.

Do you know if those statements are from third parties who have been able to test drives to determine whether or not they are shingled or if they are statements from a manufacturer which has been caught deceiving customers over a period of years about which drives are shingled?

A number of those do appear to be restatements of content from Seagate themsleves, but Synology seem to have done some independent certification as to what will work with their NAS devices - https://www.synology.com/en-global/compatibility?search_by=products&model=DS918%2B&category=hdds_no_ssd_trim&filter_brand=Seagate&p=1

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