What does this have to do with My Cloud Home (MCH)? Well, what you don’t know may hurt you (or your data). What most MCH users don’t know is that the greatest threat to their data may not be WD Discovery or KDDFS file system or the mobile apps. The greatest threat may be that the hard disk drive that is in their MCH is most likely a WD?0EFAX series of harddrives that uses SMR (shingled magnetic recording). Searching through the subform, I was surprised to find that there is only one mention of SMR on the MCH forum and I was the one who posted it:
Here is how you find out the hard disk model number on your MCH without mangle and break open the unit. First of all you will have to download the debug_logs.zip file and you could do that by following the link just above. Then you could mount or unzip the zip file and scan the zip file with ‘Treesize free’ for ‘WDC’ which could give you something like this with WDC WD40EFAX as the hard drive:
In all probability, if your MCH is less than 8TB, you will have a WD?0EFAX series of SMR drives and may be eligible for a claim of a few dollars. Frankly I would have rather WDC charged a few dollar more to use CMR drives or at least mention that WDC were using SMR drives in the MCH. In the long run if I continue to use the several MCH units that I have, I would most likely have to replace these harddrives with SSDs or CMR harddrives.
Here is the link to the claims:
Potential plaintiffs can file a claim at a website set up for the settlement. The payouts to claimants will be based on the size of the HDD they purchased, as well as how many they bought. Those who purchased either the 2TB or 3TB WD Red NAS Drives is eligible to receive $4.00 for each drive, while those who bought either 4TB or 6TB WD Red capacity drives are entitled to $7.00 for each drive purchased. These values may be adjusted on a pro-rata basis depending on the number of claims filed, up to 85% of the value of each drive. The specific HDD models are: WD20EFAX (2TB capacity), WD30EFAX (3TB capacity), WD40EFAX (4TB capacity), and WD60EFAX (6TB capacity) HDDs.
The lawsuit, Malone, et al v. Western Digital Corporation , claims that Western Digital misrepresented the drives’ performance by not listing the usage of SMR anywhere in their specifications. Per the settlement, Western Digital will mention the use of SMR on WD Red NAS Drives for “no less than 4 years after Final Approval of the Settlement.”
What is SMR, why is it so slow at random writes and why is it unsuitable for NAS? This has all been covered elsewhere and pictures are so much easier to read. In the next post, if this thread is still around, I will post actual read errors examples from a WD40EFAX SMR HDD in a My Cloud Home.
This settlement is still on going until Nov 27, 2021 and since this thread is still on the forum, it appears WDC is agreeable to the terms of the settlement. This is perhaps because most My Cloud Home owner don’t realize what kind of hard drive is in their storage unit and don’t know the danger of data loss until the warranty or the claim is over. The following is a simple GSMARTCTL run and errors and error dates of the WD40EFAX SMR drive that is typical in the My Cloud Home storage, see the first post on how to find out for your unit.
Only 4 days left to file your claim for US residents who bought WD SMR drives used in a NAS type device between October 2018 and July 21, 2021. It takes about 5 minutes to file, basically just enter address and email and affirmation that you bought a WD SMR during the specified period.
4 out of 4 My Cloud Home I bought from Amazon were SMR drives so your chances of having a SMR HDD in your MCH is pretty high if it is less than 8 TB in size.
I ended up replacing MCH SMR HDDs with SSDs and used the SMR as archival storage (write once, read many times) in USB enclosures (free enclosures if you’ve already shucked a few WD Easystore or Elements USB drives for other purposes).
Hello tekram.
Your topic answered a lot for me, since I never considered actual disc to be the bottleneck, I blamed software and network.
But another curiosity is that it lags heavily when tranferring .pdf files, no matter their size. Is there an explanation for that, and maybe a solution? Im using FreeFyleSync for tranfer.
