Crypto SMR Drives in the Market
in Technical
Western Digital has admitted they switched some Reds to being shingled drives. Seagate and Toshiba have also been shipping SMR drives without telling people too apparently. Avoiding SMR has gotten tougher apparently.
WD Blog: On WD Red NAS Drives
Western Digital admits 2TB-6TB WD Red NAS drives use shingled magnetic recording
Western Digital, Seagate Are Shipping Slow SMR Drives Without Informing Customers: Reports [Updated]
Comments
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-fesses-up-some-red-hdds-use-slow-smr-tech
https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/seagate-2-4-and-8tb-barracuda-and-desktop-hdd-smr/
https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/16/toshiba-desktop-disk-drives-undocumented-shingle-magnetic-recording/
Hey teamacc. You're a dick. (c) Jon Biloh, 2020.
HGST stands tall... I guess...
DEATHSTAR CREW FOREVER (or at least until mid-2001)
My pronouns are like/subscribe.
HGST is WD now. Oh well, we're another step closer to HDD's being historical.
I know, but it looks like the worst case scenario didn't happen with aquisition, and they still are the best. That being said I don't know, maybe it simply hasn't been discovered that they use SMR. And of course everything can change in an instant.
The WD Blog post seems to indicate HGST doesn't sell SMR drives. Since they're having to apologize publicly, now would be the time to mention which drives are SMR.
WD has now released a list
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-lists-all-drives-slower-smr-techNOLOGY
From the Tom's article...
Well, yeah. I don't think anyone is debating SMR being useful in the correct situation. They're complaining the SMR Reds didn't work as advertised or as well as the CMR Reds.
Maybe it's time for a Brown line.
WD Blacks, the old school pinnacle of performance, now in SMR.
Francisco
All their lines are brown now.
Unfortunately other manufacturers are doing same. I guess that makes research more important
I had a Black, or I still have a Black. I'm not sure if it's still in the tech closet or not. Anyway, it was hot for it's time.
So was Goldie Hawn.
My pronouns are like/subscribe.
I have a 4TB external SMR that I've only created 3TB of ext4 and luks volumes for.
This should theoretically give me superior read write performance?
Superior to what? Superior to 4TB of ext4 and luks volumes? As far as I know not really, because disk controller doesn't care what filesystem claimed to be it's real estate.
The story is different with SSDs where OS actually tells disk controller what to consider empty space for controller's internal use.
If you mean you're only using the closest bit of the drive as opposed to the entire drive, unless it's on a single platter, you're still just wasting space. I don't remember the last time I've seen a single platter drive, and other than the outer side being marginally larger than the inner - you're not really going to see any real performance differences unless it's a very slow spin and crappy cache.
You're literally shaving fractions of a millisecond, if anything. This is highly useless.
My pronouns are like/subscribe.
Luks setup has an optional but desirable setting that causes it to write random data all over the disk when you initialize the disk. It is optional because it is a slow process, but you should use it because it conceals the amount of disk space you are actually consuming. If you use the feature, it sounds to me like that will slow down any SMR updates a lot. Maybe it's possible to scribble the disk like that, then use TRIM to tell the SMR system that the space is not in use.
"New and improved! WD's Skid Mark Recording (SMR) Brown line!"
No. I did not prescrub the luks volume knowing it was SMR.
The luks volume is just to make drive disposal easier in case I suddenly lose access to it.
Update: I have two WD Blacks, and I just threw them into two SFF Optiplexes I'm trying to fix.
Server The Home has a good take on the SMR fiasco.
They point out no one in the WD c-suite wanted to be attached to this, the blog post was authored by "Western Digital"
, and WD made no commitment to not submarine inappropriate tech into low end drives for the sake of profit in the future.
let's not get carried away, SMR is not "inapropriate tech"
not mentioning anywhere a drive is using SMR is inapropriate
EDIT:
sorry, now I know the word "to submarine" exists
Someone else posted, not sure here or somewhere else, here's what is literaly taught in business schools: "small quality downgrades are usually not noticed by consumers, it's only drastic changes that may cause issues"
So yeah, they will always do that.
Of course. There's always a sweet spot in the price to performance ratio, and I'm good with living with those trade-offs provided I have correct information.
No one would have care if the SMR Reds had worked for their intended purpose, so yes, exactly your point.
I'm mainly focused on Reds when I make comments since they are supposed to be focused on NAS devices and storage servers, and getting 2TB+ drives for arrays is the only reason I buy HDs these days. <=1TB of data goes on flash.
This could be the end of the shucking golden era