Western Digital Hit With Lawsuits For Selling Slower SMR HDDs In Secret

Western Digital (WD), the brand known for its storage solutions, was recently slapped with multiple class-action lawsuits in the US and Canada. The crime of the accused? For secretly selling slower SMR-based HDDs without full public disclosure of the act.

The company famed for its HDDs and recently, SSDs after its acquisition of SanDisk, was accused of sneaking in shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology into its WD RED NAS HDDs. It wasn’t until after a report from Tom’s Hardware about the act that WD later published a complete list of SMR-driven HDDS it had tried to market off as Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) drives.

NAD using SMR-based HDDs are typically regarded as being unsuitable for both NAS applications and other RAID deployments. By comparison, a WD RED NAS HDD running on SMR is theoretically 13 times slower than a similar HDD running in CMR configuration.

(Image source: The Star)

In one particular case, the lawsuit details how a user of the SMR-driven WD NAS drives were reporting timeouts and loss of connectivity to the NAS. Potentially causing the NAS to suffer a “catastrophic data loss”.

At the time of writing, the lawsuits against WD are still ongoing.

(Source: Techspot // Image: Techspot)

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