Like other HDD manufacturers, Western Digital has kept secret the disadvantageous SMR technology for some hard drives. In the case of the WD Red series for NAS, this was particularly difficult. The class action lawsuit filed by those affected is expected to result in a settlement costing Western Digital $ 2.7 million.
As Law Street reports, citing an official document, Plaintiffs have submitted a paper to the court with the terms of a settlement with Western Digital. When all court costs and attorney's fees are taken into account, the Settlement Fund is estimated to be $ 2.7 million. The case will be heard on July 21, 2021.
72 to 153 dollars compensation per HDD
According to the writing, participants in the class action can make a payment of Earned $ 4.00 to $ 7.00 per HDD purchased without providing proof of purchase. A plaintiff should be entitled to a maximum of 72.24 to 152.99 US dollars per HDD, which corresponds to 85 percent of the respective purchase price.
Furthermore, Western Digital is to be obliged to clearly disclose the technology used in each HDD on product packaging and on its websites for the next four years. The manufacturer had already reacted in the meantime and now indicates the use of SMR on product pages and data sheets. In addition, Western Digital now only carries NAS hard drives without SMR technology under the brands WD Red Plus or WD Red Pro in order to clearly differentiate them from the SMR models.
WD Red with SMR, WD Red Plus and WD Red Pro with CMR (Image: Western Digital) < h2 class = "text-width text-h2" id = "section_alle_macher_verheimlichten_smreinsatz"> All manufacturers concealed SMR use
In April 2020 it became known that Western Digital was using SMR technology in hard drives of the WD Red series without specifying this. SMR increases the data density per magnetic disk (platter) through clapboard-like overlapping tracks, but has the disadvantage that adjacent tracks also have to be updated when rewriting. Depending on the scenario, this can result in massive performance losses, which is why SMR hard drives are usually only used for archiving. Users had become aware of the use of SMR in some WD-Red models due to problems when restoring RAID configurations.
In retrospect, it was not just more HDDs -Series from Western Digital, but also the two other hard drive manufacturers in the form of Seagate and Toshiba were affected by the “secret” use of SMR.
The case was more severe at Western Digital , because NAS hard drives explicitly advertised as RAID suitability were secretly sold with SMR, although SMR restricts the use of RAID.
Second SMR- Lawsuit initially dismissed
Another lawsuit against Western Digital, in which the not publicly communicated change from CMR to SMR technology was objected, was initially dismissed by the competent court. However, the plaintiffs still have until June 22nd to submit an amended version.
Update 06/17/2021 11:58 AM
The notification has been adjusted with regard to the amount of compensation.