Lawsuit vs. Western Digital wants to end any use of SMR in NAS drives

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Law firm Hattis & Lukacs has filed an amendment to its class-action lawsuit against Western Digital for including SMR technology in its WD Red line of NAS drives. The amendment adds five more named plaintiffs from five new states, and it includes significant additional technical detail.

If you aren't up-to-date on the SMR saga, this is one article in an ongoing series. The short version: SMR—Shingled Magnetic Recording—is a relatively new hard drive recording technology which allows higher data densities. It does so by laying down overlapping tracks—like shingles on a roof—with a write head that's wider than the read head. Unfortunately, this technology makes rewriting existing disk sectors agonizingly slow in many cases—rewriting a single 4KiB sector will generally mean needing to both read and rewrite an entire 256MiB zone.

The original American class-action suit (there's a Canadian one as well) had a single named plaintiff, Wisconsin's Nicholas Malone. The amendment features five new plaintiffs, each from a different state, and tells each plaintiff's story in detail. New York plaintiff Steve Gravel's story is particularly wince-inducing—he wasn't just using the drives for photo and movie storage; he had an iSCSI target on his QNAP NAS, and the performance decrease when he replaced CMR drives with SMR was, as you might expect, terrible.

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