Hattis & Lukacs, an American law firm specializing in class action and consumer law, revealed that it had launched a plaintiff request process for a potential class action against Western Digital. According to the firm, WD has not disclosed in its marketing warranties and product specifications that many of its hard drives use Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology, which has been found to slow down hard drive performance. SMR involves overlaying recording tracks on a hard drive to reduce manufacturing costs and increase hard drive capacity. Urging all purchasers of the affected products, which include a range of WD Blue and Black drives, to submit their names, Hattis & Lukacs alleged that customers of the former complained of "significantly slower" storage and write performance. . especially when deployed in RAID configurations. Hattis & Lukacs has already won settlements against McAfee and TracFone.
Apologies from WD
Another firm, Top Class Actions, also appeared to take legal action against WD in Canada, noting that the company could face a host of similar class actions around the world. WD, which switched from standard conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology to SRM for some of its offerings, has apologized to its customers. In a conciliation move, the company released the names of all of its hard drives that used SMR without prior disclosure. The development follows recent reports showing that SMR drives record slower speeds when running various workloads, compared to CMR drives. For example, it takes 13 to 16 times longer to complete a failed array rebuild for a four-drive RAID array driven by WD Red NAS hard drives with SMR. This shows that SMR drives can make data at risk much longer than their CMR counterparts, an essential aspect as WD markets WD Red NAS drives for RAID arrays. Tom's Hardware had contacted WD to ask if the storage equipment maker was replacing SMR drives with CMR drives for certain affected customers, and the company confirmed the reports, saying it was responding to "replacement requests for product." on a case-by-case basis.” In a related development, Toshiba and Seagate, who are also suspected of failing to disclose their SMR adoption practices to customers, have now released a full list of affected drives. Via: TomsHardware