Top all-time · #2112
blog.westerndigital.com
Company blog · blog.westerndigital.comhardwaresystems
blog.westerndigital.com is the company blog at blog.westerndigital.com, writing about hardware and systems. Since 2018, 36 different Hacker News readers have linked it 39 times, most often “On WD Red NAS Drives”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (25) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Western Digital's blog for company explanations and storage technology posts, including SMR/CMR drive lists, OptiNAND, the SweRV RISC-V core and helium drives. Comments cite it as a source; none judge the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 25 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- On WD Red NAS Drives7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-04-21
- /risc-v-swerv-core-open-source/6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-08-30
- NVMe over Fabrics Explained2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-01
What Hacker News says?
> RISC is China / Eastern Imo this is a really strange characterization of RISC. I've never seen this before. I think you try to paint a misleading picture in bad faith, please consider this: - https://riscv.org/blog/how-nvidia-shipped-one-billion-risc-v... - https://tenstorrent.com/en/ip/risc-v-cpu - https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-sourc... - https://www.sifive.com - ... - https://riscv.org/a…
Comment linking /risc-v-swerv-core-open-source/
on “Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm”Submitted On WD Red NAS Drives as a story · 313 points
HN discussionHmm, so what about these modern high density hard drives which store track parameters for their servos in on-board flash (aka OptiNAND)? Do we get "spinning rust" which might loose the information where exactly it stored the data? https://blog.westerndigital.com/optinand-explained/
Comment linking /optinand-explained/
on “Unpowered SSDs slowly lose data”Submitted The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021) as a story · 158 points
HN discussionI think direct manipulation never went away, but the abstractions that were provided for general use were too useful to pass up for most workloads. Some kinds of storage like cloud-scale object storage use custom HDD firmwares and custom on-disk formats instead of filesystems (±2005-era tech), we also have much newer solutions that do direct work on disks like HMR (not to be confused with HAMR or HAMMER2) where the…
Comment linking /host-managed-smr-dropbox/
on “Apple built iCloud to store billions of databases”Submitted NVMe over Fabrics Explained as a story · 93 points
HN discussionThis is pretty spot on, so there's not much to add but a some somewhat disorganized thoughts: Object storage and block storage are similar -- the difference is usually how they're accessed but isn't necessarily (ex. s3 via FUSE projects can be thought of as block storage). Some examples of the blurring of this line: - https://github.com/minio/minfs - https://github.com/archiecobbs/s3backer - https://github.com/yande…
Comment linking /nvme-of-explained/
on “Saving on egress switching from AWS to Hetzner”Submitted What Is Zoned Storage and the Zoned Storage Initiative? as a story · 93 points
HN discussionWD has published a list of SMR drives : https://blog.westerndigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/2...
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2020/04/2020_04_22_WD_SMR_SKUs_1Slide.pdf
on “WD Red DM-SMR Update: 3 Vendors Bail and WD Knew of ZFS Issues”Submitted CERN's Exabyte Data Center as a story · 58 points
HN discussionhttps://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/ - it has since been edited though.
Comment linking /wd-red-nas-drives/
on “WD Red DM-SMR Update: 3 Vendors Bail and WD Knew of ZFS Issues”Submitted The Invention of the SD Card: When Tiny Storage Met Tech Giants as a story · 11 points
HN discussionI believe the April 20th (bottom) section of this blog post is the post in question: https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/ TLDR: They suggest different RED drives should be considered for different workloads. While that may have been their intention all along, that was not communicated well at in marketing or retail, where the drive colors (red, blue, purple, etc) used to be the appropriate method for s…
Comment linking /wd-red-nas-drives/
on “WD Red DM-SMR Update: 3 Vendors Bail and WD Knew of ZFS Issues”Submitted WD discloses list of HDDs with SMR in Apr 22 update as a story · 4 points
HN discussionFWIW WD is working on high bandwidth drives. We'll see when it hits the market though. https://blog.westerndigital.com/performance-optimized-hdd-4x...
Comment linking /performance-optimized-hdd-4x-throughput-hbdt-dual-pivot/
on “Backblaze drive stats for Q2 2026”Submitted Understanding Access Patterns in Machine Learning as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt's probably worth changing the link to the official blog post: https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/ Anyway, this is all I wanted from them. "Here are what technologies each drive uses, and we'll be more transparent in the future." Now I can be confident in what I'm getting when I buy a Western Digital drive. Good for them!
Comment linking /wd-red-nas-drives/
on “WD Sets the Record Straight: Lists All Drives That Use Slower SMR Tech”Submitted Western Digital Explains Its Device-Managed Shingled Magnetic Recording (Dmsmr) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFor those unwilling to disable their Adblocker, here is the official WD blog post with PDF containing make and model numbers: https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/
Comment linking /wd-red-nas-drives/
on “WD Sets the Record Straight: Lists All Drives That Use Slower SMR Tech”Submitted What Happens After Moore's Law? (2021) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSo rather than getting stuck in potential future tarpit of AWS or GCS or Azure, or probably a dozen other companies, we should voluntarily put ourselves into the IP tarpit developed by ARM? How exactly is that a win? Over the last two decades ARM has developed a stranglehold on the non-x86 world, and they have already considered abusing this position to increase their profit margin[0]. As a chipmaker you're essentia…
Comment linking /risc-v-swerv-core-open-source/
on “Instruction Sets Should Be Free: The Case for RISC-V [pdf] (2014)”Submitted What is NVMe and why is it important as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYou are exactly right. WD explains the same in https://blog.westerndigital.com/rise-helium-drives/ : « Without air, the heads will crash into the disk »
Comment linking /rise-helium-drives/
on “The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates”Submitted Western Digital to Sell Non-SMR WD Red Plus Drives, WD Red Still SMR as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> they design their own SSD controller silicon in-house And they've been leaning into RISC-V[1] due to this. [1]: https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-sourc...
Comment linking /risc-v-swerv-core-open-source/
on “WD announces enterprise 128TB SSD”Submitted OmniXtend cache-coherent memory fabric over Ethernet for RISC-V as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHow I can distinguish news discussing a processor core design (seemingly, usually, marketed as a "core") from that discussing hardware that I can actually buy (a processor "chip")? I would have thought that 1. https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-sourc... 2. https://greenwaves-technologies.com/ai_processor_gap8/ and 3. https://syntacore.com/page/products/processor-ip/scr1 would be pieces of hardwar…
Comment linking /risc-v-swerv-core-open-source/
on “Sipeed Longan Nano – RISC-V Development Board”Submitted Understanding SSD Endurance as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSee e.g. https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-sourc...
Comment linking /risc-v-swerv-core-open-source/
on “A dedicated licence for open-source hardware: CERN OHL approved by OSI”For anyone wondering "why", this linked article in the source gives some background, https://blog.westerndigital.com/storage-architectures-zettab... So instead of SMR harddrives and SSDs doing extra work to hide their deficiencies, they're pushing this up into the filesystem. In return you get slightly more storage and slightly faster IO. Perhaps not useful on a desktop, but very useful when dealing with thousands o…
Comment linking /storage-architectures-zettabyte-age/
on “What Is Zoned Storage and the Zoned Storage Initiative?”
