People are suing Western Digital for sneaking those SMR disks into their supply chain. They're supposed to be red in color if what I read in the news is correct.
On Mon, 8 Jun 2020, Dan Ritter wrote: > Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 16:33:29 > From: Dan Ritter <[email protected]> > To: Matthew Campbell <[email protected]> > Cc: Debian User Support <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: How long will this take? > Resent-Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2020 20:33:43 +0000 (UTC) > Resent-From: [email protected] > > Matthew Campbell wrote: > > I bought a new 4 terrabyte hard drive that is connected with a USB cable > > using USB2. It took about 32 hours to read every sector on the drive to > > look for bad sectors. I started blanking the sectors using /dev/zero last > > Friday night. It still isn't done. Is there a way I can find out how much > > data a particular process has written to the disk? I'm using Debian 10.4. > > > > dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb ibs=4096 count=976754646 > > USB2 disks are good for about 25MB/s. > > 4 seconds gets you 100MB. > > 40 seconds gets you 1000MB. > > 4000 * 40 seconds is 160000 seconds, so that's not quite two > days. > > Is something wrong? Based on current news reports, I would say > you accidentally purchased an SMR disk. (By accidentally, I mean > that the box didn't say, the ad didn't say, and the manufacturer > might even have lied to you for a while.) > > https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/list-of-known-smr-drives.141/ > > Is it one of those? > > If so, return it. Tell the store that it's an unlabelled SMR > drive. They'll take it back. > > -dsr- > > --
