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seagate_surfer

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About seagate_surfer

  • Birthday Nov 01, 1979

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  1. Yes, I also think so from my own perspective of a single worker and it is only an opinion! But Seagate has made this clear since the technology was first introduced in 2013 and so far it doesn't look any different. Checking the RPM and the warranty is not written anywhere, I only made it up after comparing all the spec-sheets of all HDDs one by one available on the website. Seagate's policy is clear, they won't reveal which ones use SMR or PMR, but I hope everyone willing to be more informed than the average consumer can find this, and can also use it to help them make a better purchase decision.
  2. You are welcome! That's for sure, they are two separate worlds. That's not what i said, sorry if you misunderstood me. Cold storage is not the only use for SMR, but I didn't mean to say that NAS is cold storage, just the opposite. In response to whether IronWolf is SMR or not I said: The characteristics of an SMR drive are not the characteristics of a NAS-type HDD. There are also cheap non-SMR hard drives in the cheapest line of all, the BarraCuda! And they have only a 2 year warranty too. Basically the SMR market is "the lowest cost per GB" market, and IronWolf does not meet that characteristic, also remember that SMR is not for performance focused tasks and that is also another feature that does not fit. IronWolf does offer an excellent performance on high performance tasks because it is a NAS type HDD that offers a level-like-Enterprise (the Pro is even closer) performance. So the NAS drives cannot be SMR because of the nature of SMR itself and the projected tasks of what the HDD will be doing inside a NAS device. It was you who started this thread and in response to your first comment I said: external HDDs are cheaper, because you are not supposed to buy an external storage device and try to connect it in your NAS equipment, that's not how things work. "Cold storage" means data that is not accessed frequently. So, you don't need performance if your application will be cold storage... I said this because I wanted to reinforce the fact that a backup unit must remain inside the backup enclosure and not outside, because when you take them out and put them to work on something they weren't made for, the things that happened in the Louis Rossmann video happen, then I said: For example, buying SMR drives for your NAS device would be ugly due to all the rewrites that may be involved. So don't do that and buy NAS drives if you are going to put them inside a NAS device. And also, chances are that the units within external devices are SMR units, and that fact may not be obvious, but now you know! So please don't do hardware shucking and if you do (because people don't listen), forget about NAS usage. Yes, I saw that the WD NAS line was what started this hot new topic. The truth is that I totally ignore what WD is doing, but SG has not yet made the newest technology available to the public because those HAMR-type HDDs don't just rely on SMR, but also in other techniques and technologies like CMR, MACH.2 and TDMR and they reach SSD transfer speeds, but are currently unique to data centers. The Exos 5E8 also explicitly says that it is SMR, but it is also on a Enterprise level, it is not supposed to use this type of models in normal machines because a normal machine is not ready for them, they lack some features to fully extract everything they can offer. I also said that Archive v2 hard drives for cold storage were the old school drives for business, but it is no longer available on our website. I've reinforced this up, but once again. Standard drives can handle roughly 55TB of writings per year, and that's on regular weekdays (about 8-hr shifts to 12-hr shifts), 5 days a week and they can easily do that, regardless of whether they are SMR or not. A home NAS may need more than 3 times that horsepower and data centers 10 times that amount. One does not simply buy standard units for use at a projected NAS level. "A drive’s reliability is found in the right match between the device and what you need it to do. So pick the right drive for the job. It will thank you with an extended reliability."
  3. Thank you! I don't know what happened to WD but this seems to sum it up: I see what you're saying, they tried to put it all in the same presentation. Yes, I guess they could have also put the links to the product specs when you click on the name or something, yeah...
  4. I saw your recent... let's just call it wall in tech news. very interesting read btw

     

    you're more than free to come back with a personal account here, in case it doesn't go through with setting this up again

     

    either way, I wish you the best dude

    1. seagate_surfer

      seagate_surfer

      Oh this is so nice! Thank you very much man. I will do that to review periodically, I liked the community anyway. Stay safe and healthy! 

  5. Yes, that is a perspective and you are right! If it were the case and the drives were that bad, no one would buy hard drives anymore.
  6. You will be wise enough to know as long as you can pick the right drive, Would you drive a minivan down the race track? Disk drives keep track of various drive usage such as power-on hours, lifetime writes and lifetime reads from the host computer. With this data we can calculate an Annualized Workload Rate using this simple formula: Annualized Workload Rate = (Lifetime Writes + Lifetime Reads) * (8760 / Lifetime Power On Hours) 8760 are the number of hours in a year. The Workload Rate becomes an annualized average expressed as TB/year. Disk drives are specifically designed to perform to up to certain levels of Workload Rates. These are called Workload Rate Limit s (WRL). Here are the common Workload Rate Limits for the common disk drive design segments: Segment Workload Rate Limit Standard <55 TB/yr NAS, Surveillance archive. <180 TB/yr Enterprise NAS (Nearline Lite) <300 TB/yr Enterprise Capacity (Nearline) <550 TB/yr What happens when you use a standard HDD in heavy workloads, remembering that these hard drives are meant to operate 5 days a week, 8 hours a day? You guessed it. Premature failure... You may use SeaTools Bootable for internal drives and SeaTools for Windows on the external drives to measure your drive’s Annualized Workload Rate by running the Drive Information test. In the table above, compare your Workload Rate to the corresponding Workload Rate Limit. If your value is below the WRL then the drive activity is supported by the design. If the value is above the WRL then the reliability of the drive will begin to decline: SeaTools | Seagate Support US
  7. The reading gets a bit long, I know! In short, the answer is no, not necessarily because the characteristics of an SMR drive are not the characteristics of a NAS-type HDD. There are also cheap non-SMR hard drives in the cheapest line of all, the BarraCuda! And they have only a 2 year warranty too. Basically the SMR market is "the lowest cost per GB" market, and IronWolf does not meet that characteristic, also remember that SMR is not for performance focused tasks and that is also another feature that does not fit. IronWolf does offer an excellent performance on high performance tasks because it is a NAS type HDD that offers a level-like-Enterprise (the Pro is even closer) performance. So the NAS drives cannot be SMR because of the nature of SMR itself and the projected tasks of what the HDD will be doing inside a NAS device. The Enterprise market is just another world different from the consumer markets in so many areas, back in the days when the 5TB was launched, the Archive v2 HDDs was the only SMR and it was not for consumers, that drive is no longer under production but now we have the Exos 5E8, its projected usage says "Perfect for Archival data" (cold storage) and the documentation specifies it is SMR, the cost per GB does matter for the Enterprise market because they purchase in bulk, and usually we regular human beings don't pay much attention to this and the logic to us the regular mortals, sometimes don't make any sense in the Enterprise market. They have dedicated equipment to store files that will be accesed once or twice a year (long term storage), and they don't require the best performance of all, but they cannot risk this data to be lost, here is where SMR plays a role and this techonlogy is paired with other techniques for this specific use case, different firmware programming etc... Another example is the HAMR technology, its performance is like an entry level SSD (about 480MB/s), it is not yet available to consumers but this technology is assisted by SMR, CMR, TDMR, MACH.2... Perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), will eventually run out of steam at about 1 terabit-per-square inch. HAMR should take us up to about 5Tb/square inch. Then a new technology called “heated-dot magnetic recording,” or HDMR, should take us up to 10 Tb/square inch. HDMR essentially combines the techniques used in HAMR with bit-patterned media. "the right drive for the job" means that the drive is prepared from factory for what it was meant to be used, nothing less and nothing more.
  8. I quote the following sentence as verbatim from the Seagate page How to Choose the Right Hard Drive | Seagate US to begin my comment, I am going to quote several times today but this basically sums it up: "A drive’s reliability is found in the right match between the device and what you need it to do. So pick the right drive for the job. It will thank you with an extended reliability." Let's get on the DeLorean time machine and "go back to the future" by looking at the past when this technology was first introduced, based on the documentation from 2013 (Seagate Delivers On Technology Milestone: First To Ship Hard Drives Using Next-Generation Shingled Magnetic Recording | News Archive | Seagate US and also Breaking Capacity Barriers With Seagate Shingled Magnetic Recording | Seagate US), I keep quoting: "Yet even at 1TB per disk and 4TB per drive, consumers continue to demand more storage. So, what’s next? How can we continue to grow areal densities to meet the demand for high capacity in a world bursting with digital creation and consumption? Introducing Seagate SMR..." "Shingled Magnetic Technology is the First Step to Reaching a 20 Terabyte Hard Drive by 2020" “With SMR technology, Seagate is on track to improve areal density by up to 25 percent or 1.25TB per disk, delivering hard drives with the lowest cost per gigabyte and reaching capacities of 5TB and beyond. ~Mark Re, Seagate’s chief technology officer.” Please pay special attention to phrases like "lowest $/TB cost", "Cold storage", "store more data at lower costs", "Perfect for Archival data", "Low random-write workloads", "suitable for sequential tasks", "the most cost-effective", "keeping costs low", etc... Because decisions were made based on this and this is basically what SMR is for. When this came to light, there was coverage and some pages like arnnet, pcworld and computerworld revealed the news, basically they did copy/paste each other on the same interview, but in one part it said the following: "Mark Re, Seagate's chief technology officer, said in a statement. Seagate would not disclose which of its drive models today use SMR. It would only say that system makers that use them know they're using them." Of course! Let's not forget that this was in 2013 and that the world we know today was different at that time, everything was PMR so saying something like that was an easy task. Only one specific model was going to be marketed as SMR to the computer makers, and it was a model for business storage, not for consumers, the consumers do not deal directly with manufacturers, they do it through suppliers/vendors and this is how they obtain the products. As always, the technology is applied to the business market first before a consumer version is released, those makers deal directly with the manufacturer, in this case Seagate, and then they are granted access to technology and proprietary data under specific limitations in a contract, that only allows them to share information between entities that are involved in the development of whatever they are going to produce, non-completion of this or an information leak can lead to legal problems. You can see the old list of business products and see that the model that was advertised as "Lowest cost-per-TB" hard drive was the "Archive HDD". Other products of the time were Terascale® HDD, 1200 SSD, Enterprise Performance HDD 15K and 10K HDD, Enterprise Capacity HDD 2.5 and 3.5. Documentation can barely be found because chances are these hard drives are no longer being produced. With this technology which is also a low power consumption technology, it didn't take long for the first external HDD based on SMR to be produced, and The World's First USB-Powered Desktop External Drive | Seagate Blog was launched on the market: "Innov8 utilizes Seagate’s 'Archive HDD' platform, which provides reliable, low-power data retrieval based on shingled-magnetic recording (SMR) technology. SMR overlaps data tracks, like shingles on a roof, to increase areal density." Getting power from the USB port is your signal man! I've repeated myself hundreds of times here on this forum to avoid hardware shucking, but you didn't want to listen. When you open an external HDD and you take out the HDD, what you are getting is an SMR drive, except on occasions when for some reason no SMR units are available and a batch of PMR devices are approved to be used instead, but those occasions are rare. Remember I told you about the low cost per GB? For this reason, external HDDs are cheaper, because you are not supposed to buy an external storage device and try to connect it in your NAS equipment, that's not how things work. "Cold storage" means data that is not accessed frequently. So, you don't need performance if your application will be cold storage, that takes a back seat and density becomes the most important thing. You just don't cheap out in the most important part of your computer: "your personal and unrecoverable-from-the-Internet information". You use technology for what it was made for and take advantage of its different applications, and you extract the juice from each of your pennies wisely. If you require the unit to work on daily workloads 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you purchase a unit that was designed for that and says it in the product sheet, or you're just going to end up ruining it in a matter of months. The clearest example of hardware shucking I have is the video by Louis Rossmann Are Seagate hard drives good quality? - YouTube. In that video, he ended up saying that Seagate is the most hated brand by those who are dedicated to data recovery, and I remember that almost immediately the internet was completely full by different versions of the same comment everywhere, people saying that SG is the most hated brand and if you don't believe it, ask any data recovery man, but in many cases, these people just repeat and have never done anything that's close to data recovery. You are not supposed to take OEM devices out of their original equipment. You can even pause the video at 2:15, flip your phone, then enter that serial number on the warranty verification page and the firmware finder and you will see that no support is available. OEM products stay where they belong, backup drives stay in their own cases and you treat them like an external drive, not as a NAS hard drive or high-performance computer drive: FW finder: Seagate Technology - Download Finder Warranty checker: Warranty & Replacements | Seagate Support US A few years later, anandtech interviewed Mark Re (Seagate to Expand Usage of SMR - The Evolution of HDDs in the Near Future: Speaking with Seagate CTO, Mark Re), and the decision about disclosing this information remains the same, and also thanks to SMR Seagate unveils the first 2.5 High-Density Mobile Drive for laptops: In fact, every SMR drive has zones that use PMR recording technology with relatively fast writes. Those zones are used to quickly record data and perform other necessary operations when needed. Eventually, information from PMR zones is automatically moved to SMR zones without any actions from the user or the operating system. One can think about it as some sort of garbage collection that needs to be triggered by the firmware. Seagate does not disclose actual configurations of its SMR bands or capacity of PMR zones, but notes that such configurations depend on types of applications that the HDDs are designed for (i.e., consumer drives and drives for cold storage have different configurations). By then the product list had already been expanded to a wide range of USB powered external drives, along with a variety of consumer drives as well. "Cold storage" is not the only application that can be given to SMR, because of the laws of physics, we can't get enough field anymore, so we continue to evolve and based on the PMR, the SMR technology was built, then the HAMR technology assisted by SMR and TDMR was born and later to HDMR (HAMR+BPMR+TDMR), and this is how we introduced the first Exos based on this HAMR technology but now under Dave Mosley, the new CEO of Seagate. Always techonology is first developed for Enterprise markets and hopefully later this tech will make it consumers, Linus actually made a video about it: *Did You Know?: BackBlaze did hardware shucking for a couple of years after the floods that caused the Thailand HDD Crisis, more on that here: Farming Hard Drives: How Backblaze Weathered the Thailand Drive Crisis Farming Hard Drives: Two Years and $1 Million Later **You can also read literature about these technologies on the Seagate blog: You searched for HAMR | Seagate Blog You searched for smr | Seagate Blog I searched for these models myself and some of these are no longer being produced as I said, they are not available on the website and you have to do a little longer searching to find the datasheets of the Archive v2 HDDs for example. Some PDFs revision versions say it is SMR, some other revision numbers don't include that clarification. The Exos 5E8 ST8000AS0003 does say it is SMR, this is not a drive for consumers. And for the rest of them, remember: SMR drives are often the least expensive drives available when considering cost per gigabyte. If you are price sensitive, you may believe you are getting a great deal, but you may be buying the wrong disk for your specific use case. For example, buying SMR drives for your NAS device would be ugly due to all the rewrites that may be involved. So don't do that and buy NAS drives if you are going to put them inside a NAS device. And also, chances are that the units within external devices are SMR units, and that fact may not be obvious, but now you know! So please don't do hardware shucking and if you do (because people don't listen), forget about NAS usage. To be fair, manufacturers try to guide buyers on the right path for their specific use case, but much of that guidance information is lost when the buyer is often blinded by price. Another thing that you may not have noticed yet, and that will help you with the guidance, is that SMR units are not performance task focused units, so SMR drives are not 7200 RPM units, that runs counter to this whole philosophy and the reasons why the technology was created in the first place. And a second thing to consider when buying, consider the warranty. If you can't find hard drives that have 7200 RPM, then buy hard drives with a 5 year warranty, that is also another difference from PMR and SMR. We are aware of the situation and know that even gigantic companies use basic units like BarraCuda, nor even the BarraCuda Pro (5 years warranty), but the most basic BarraCuda for their heaviest tasks, that strategy depends on the moment they buy and sometimes they just decide to kill or burn cheap units and then buy good ones because they need the budget for other things, so we cannot ignore that the BarraCuda is the cheapest unit on the market and therefore is the most sold. But we cannot control the use that is given to the unit and for this reason the SMRs do not have a 5-year warranty, the PMRs do but, please note that the 2-year warranty drives can be PMR or SMR, so you double-check the RPM to confirm. Nobody will guarantee you so many years of guarantee if they were not sure that the unit will last much more than that lapse of time. Checking the RPM and the warranty is not written anywhere, I just made that up after comparing all the spec sheets of all the HDDs one by one available on the website. Seagate's policy is clear, they won't reveal which ones use SMR or PMR, but I hope everyone can use these as a guide. Don't use the cheapest HDDs if you need high performance, get the drive you deserve. Guys, you probably won't see me here anymore, I was laid off. Seagate is in a process of transition and changes are being made, so some channels are being shut down. I am multilingual, so I also work with forums of Brazilians, Peruvians, Spain, Portugal, Mexico and I do not know if this whole thing of social listening will reopen in 6 months or before or later, or if someone else will take care of this after me, I just do not know! The truth is that it is uncertain and we do not know what will happen, so if I return, I will be very happy to be here again learning with you and if it is someone else, I'll be happy as well that this support channel still exists. I just wanted to leave you this information, and with all this added value that I hope will help you clarify any questions. I saw that this is a hot topic in various forums and I feel like I could do something about it, no one has taken the time to explain this from the perspective I gave it, so if you want to share it, please feel free to do it. Without further ado, goodbye and please stay healthy. -Seagate Surfer.
  9. You're right. I think it was a misinterpretation of the documentation by the person who answered this at the time, before in the communities we were usually not used to respond with such a technical approach, and we also used to redirect customers to the technical support and customer service group. Until I got this job (2019)! I am a type of community content creator who likes to dig deeper into the technical topic a lot, and this is the type of profile I wanted to be in the communities. Anyway, sorry for the confusion, but the technology you are referring to is called RV sensor. It is included in ironWolf and also in SkyHawk, click the images to see more. Also the SkyHawk for AI-enabled surveillance solutions includes it, they reaffirm in its presentation video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s8gj4lMbw0&feature=youtu.be If you want to know if the RV sensor is included or not, go and check your model number directly on the page, in the data sheet and in the user manual, you should find information about it: https://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/hdd/skyhawk/#features
  10. Noe we are talking. Cool friend! Thanks for posting.
  11. WOW this a great photo! It looks like some kind of cover or something...
  12. Whuut! Really? So cool, don't forget to post pictures when ready.
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