WD may face Class-Action lawsuit over SMR HDDs controversy

The infamous law firm ‘Hattis & Lukacs’ is looking for plaintiffs affected by WD Red SMR HDDs. Earlier, many NAS users found multiple issues with one of the two models of the WD Red series HDD. After a series of tests, comparisons and notes, it was determined this happened because of this change. The older WD Red model used CMR technology.

The story of the SMR so far…

The Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) enabled HDD manufacturers to provide more recording capacity. However, this comes at a cost of performance and increases latency. For certain workloads such as data storage, this is not a problem. But it did for workloads typical of a SOHO specific NAS. Because of the cons, SMR-based WD Red NAS could not complete the RAID process. Many even reported the failure of ZFS formatting. The initial personnel from WD did not give the response they were looking for. But as the number of people complaining about this issue increased, WD had to issue an official response.

The issue, however, is that despite WD’s apology, they claimed SMR HDDs was not the issue. Despite the proofs given by end-users, WD didn’t have an explanation. The company said it will look into this issue on a case-by-case basis. This left its end users in confusion. People’s experiences in large quantities describing the same issue cannot be ignored. There were those who tested it and made proved its unreliability.

About Hattis and Lukacs

“Hattis & Lukacs” is a law firm that handled class action lawsuits against several companies. They handled the cases against McAfee, Dell and TracFone. The firm is not limiting the lawsuit against WD Red. But also included WD Black and WD Blue. The reason behind is because WD should have informed its users about the recording method since it affects performance. Despite a detail specification listed on its website, WD never did until this problem came up.
The firm issued the following statement:

News emerged in early April that Western Digital secretly downgraded its Red NAS hard disk drives from the standard CMR technology to the much slower SMR technology without disclosing this to its customers. Customers are complaining that this switch has resulted in drastically slower write performance and storage failures, especially when used in RAID configurations such as in network-attached storage (“NAS”) devices. This secret downgrade, apparently done to cut costs, is particularly harmful and deceptive because Western Digital advertises and promises that WD Red hard drives are meant for NAS and RAID use. But it is widely accepted that the SMR technology is wholly inappropriate for RAID and NAS device usage and can cause poor sustained write performance and failures on RAID rebuilds. In addition, Western Digital also switched some Blue and Black drives to the slower SMR technology

.Once the associates have enough plaintiffs, they can proceed with the lawsuit. If you’re one of them, you can reach them out from here. 

VIA: Toms Hardware

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