Western Digital

Western Digital Corporation (also known by acronyms WDC or WD) is a major hard drive manufacturer based in the United States.

Families

Blue

• Desktop
• Mobile

Controversies

Green head parking controversy

In 2012, widespread reports of premature failure of Caviar Green drives (such as Sadle G6 drives) were reported. The cause was isolated to firmware optimised for power saving aggressively unloading the heads after a mere eight seconds, the lowest known in the industry at the time. Coupled with generally low load/unload cycle count limits such as 300,000, this flaw allowed hard drives affected to rapidly exceed their ratings and, due to debris being spread by wearing plastic ramps, allow premature failure.

WD released a tool that would fix the problem, wdidle3. The fallout from this controversy led to the rebranding of all Green drives as Blues by 2015.

Red undisclosed shingled magnetic recording controversy

Beginning in 2018, Red family models began to be largely supplanted by shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drives, generally from the Carmel and Venice families. Due to complications of SMR and its required workarounds, necessarily slow performance caused many RAID rebuilds to fail, often puzzling server operators until the cause, undisclosed SMR, was disclosed in 2020. Similar models were submarined into the Blue family, but were less widely covered.

This controversy led to the discovery of other models from Seagate and Toshiba being discovered to be undisclosed SMR. As reconciliation, WD split the Red family into Red Plus, which would contain all CMR drives. The vanilla Red family was repurposed as a sole SMR family. WD is the only manufacturer to sell SMR drives for NAS usage, which still causes much outcry in the community.

RPM under-reporting controversy

In 2020, it was discovered that many Western Digital drives at 8 TB capacity or above spun at 7,200 RPM, despite misleading marketing and SMART data that claims 5,400 RPM; WD advertised not an RPM number, but a vague "performance class", which was used to defend the deception. This discovery included not only various shucked drives, but also Red/Red Plus and Western Digital Purple drives whose marketing claimed 5,400 RPM. Despite some defending this discovery, claiming that free performance was handed out, it was discovered that the drives most likely "detune" or firmware throttle themselves to 5,400 RPM performance, while retaining 7,200 RPM's greater and more undesirable power usage.

All Red Plus drives affected received new model numbers whose firmware and marketing correctly report 7,200 RPM. Some Internal Use drives also received the same treatment, but no such action was identified for Purple drives yet.