Month: May 2020

Client alert: Beware of new Western Digital Red NAS drives

Quite an important issue for Photo libraries and photographers who keep their images and data on a NAS device (network attached storage).
 
I have been using and supplying NAS devices for decades now and helped quite a number of clients solve their image storage issues with them. A big favorite for populating these devices has been Western Digital RED drives. These drives are specially built for NAS use and have been very reliable.
 
Unfortunately that has all changed as Western Digital have now introduced some of their lower end technology into the drives without telling customers. This technology (SMR) restricts performance and could compromise data during a rebuild, this is not good.
 
All my customers have the better CMR version drives installed so no panic there (though we need to make sure any warrantee replacements are for CMR drives).
 
Going forward I will now only be using Seagate Ironwolf drives for NAS use, these drives are as good as CMR Red drives and Seagate have vowed never to put the lower end SMR technology into their NAS drives.
 
Western Digital are facing a lawsuit in the US over their deceptive (and frankly fraudulent) behavior. Such a shame.

You can read a detailed report on the problem here:
WD Red SMR vs CMR Tested Avoid Red SMR | ServeTheHome
We tested WD Red SMR v CMR drives to see if there was indeed a significant impact with the change. We found SMR can put data at risk 13-16x longer than CMR

 

Update: 25/06/2020.
Western Digital have decided to sort this problem by introducing a third tier to their “Red” drives. The only purpose of this development is to get out of the problem upper management created and wished was gone away.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15878/western-digital-cleans-up-the-red-smr-nas-hdd-mess

From now on Red Drives mean “avoid”.

Losing work in Lightroom – dont let it happen!


I have recently had a cluster of new clients who for one reason or another approach me after losing images or other assets in Adobe Lightroom.

Whilst Lightroom is a pretty good program for managing large amounts of images there are certain “quirks” that can cause real problems.

On of the biggest problems comes from mistaking images that are either “deselected”, “selected” or “most selected”.

You can work on more than one image at once, you can tell when one or more images are selected because their colour surround changes to a slightly different shade of grey, if you get these mixed up (easy to do!) you can lose a lot of work.

I helped a client via the Mac screen sharing app this Sunday to help retrieve a book he had been working on for many hours, without the 15 minute intervention he may have faced many hours of work to recover. Fortunately I had set him up to make sure he saved backup copies of his Lightroom catalog as well as have a time machine drive attached at all times, this belt and braces approach makes for a much better ability to recover from a bad situation.

If you have hit a major problem or just want help in setting things up correctly then get in contact with me and we can sort it together.

Help is available!
Stephen Johnson
Stephen@copyrightimage.co.uk
Mobile: 07776 448621