Since it can provide 25% more capacity than conventional CMR hard drives, SMR shingled hard drives are also very popular. However, reliability issues inevitably cause people to worry. Now Western Digital is investigating this issue. Western Digital has confirmed that it is investigating reliability issues with older hard drives discovered by data recovery researchers, mainly involving 2TB to 6TB red and blue disk models released around 2020, which use SMR technology.
"Trust and reliability are the foundation of everything we do at Western Digital," Western Digital said. "We take the issues reported at 030 Datenrettung Berlin seriously and have activated our engineering team to investigate to understand the scope and details of these reports."
German media previously reported that several data recovery researchers reported problems with Western Digital's low-capacity SMR hard drives.These 2-6TB drives increase the potential for errors, up to permanent data loss and physical damage.
These models mainly involve2TB, 3TB, 4TB and 6TB models with WD*0EZAZ, WD*0EDAZ and WD*0EFAX numbers, these drives are prone to an unusually high number of failures.
In addition, Western Digital's purple disks will also be included in the high-risk list, but Western Digital said that the purple disk series uses different firmware, and the same problem will not affect these hard drives, and SMR hard disks with larger capacities will not have this problem.
The good news is that SMR hard drives with EZAZ, EDAZ and EFAX numbers have basically been discontinued, but some products are still in stock, so you can avoid SMR hard drives for the time being.
In addition, this is not the first time that SMR hard drives have caused trouble for Western Digital. In 2021, Western Digital was unwilling to disclose that these hard drives used SMR technology, triggering a class-action lawsuit. In the end, Western Digital paid US$2.7 million in compensation, and each user participating in the lawsuit could receive compensation of US$4-7.
