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seagate_surfer

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  1. Agree
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from Ydfhlx in SSD TIER LIST   
    I try to make it simple because consumers generally don't care about details such as the cost per GB or the type of NAND, just give them a SATA 3 SSD and wait, they will most likely end up very happy with the new speeds of their computers. To make it simpler, I suggest people to buy from well-known brands and to buy an SSD that offers 5 years of warranty because no manufacturer is going to risk offering so much time if they were not sure that the SSD will last longer than that, other SSDs that only offer 2-3 years of warranty usually have a higher failure rate than SSDs that offer 5 year warranty. Once you have found this, buy the best offer you can find at that time because prices will change throughout the year and the best time to buy an SSD is when you need an SSD regardless...
  2. Like
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from Eschew in How much does HDD cache matter   
    The cache is going to affect read performance more so than write performance, as it makes certain data quicker for the drive to access. Not as big of a performance jump as you'd see going from a hard drive to an SSD, but still somewhat faster on reads. You would also want to consider that a newer drive will likely have better warranty availability and newer, sometimes better engineered firmware as well which can effect drive performance.
  3. Like
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from FakeNSA in Show off your old and retro computer parts   
    😂

  4. Informative
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from datalaughing in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
     
  5. Like
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from sub68 in Show off your old and retro computer parts   
    WOW.? I think I will never stop being surprised every time I see a restoration. Cool!
  6. Like
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from LunaP0n3 in Show off your old and retro computer parts   
    That's crazy. A Seagate from the last decade (or a little more). Logos used to be more visible on OEM products, now they put a letter only somewhere in most cases, on the SN or model number indicating the company initial.
  7. Like
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from sub68 in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    I should have included you in the answer I made for Spotty above.😅👍
  8. Like
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from PatrickWilliams in Good ssd?   
    Hello PatrickWilliams,
     
    After checking the microcenter website and some other retailers online like Amazon this drive seems to offer what they are advertising, the speeds according to the people who have tested this unit apparently are real and I didn't find any negative comments about them, except for someone saying that they buy large quantities of things made by other companies, put their name on them, and sell them cheaper. I am not sure if that's good or bad, your call Patrick!
  9. Informative
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from MimigaKing in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
     
  10. Informative
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from izumi_konota in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
     
  11. Informative
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from GOTSpectrum in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
     
  12. Informative
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from r2724r16 in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
     
  13. Like
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from ThePD in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
     
  14. Like
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from Sophia_Borjia in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
     
  15. Informative
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from WoodenMarker in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
     
  16. Like
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from Dedayog in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
     
  17. Informative
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from LAwLz in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
     
  18. Informative
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from Dabombinable in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
     
  19. Like
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from FakeNSA in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
     
  20. Informative
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from SpaceGhostC2C in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
  21. Informative
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from SpaceGhostC2C in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
     
  22. Like
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from TVwazhere in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
     
  23. Like
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from BiG StroOnZ in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
     
  24. Like
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from GDRRiley in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    I should have included you in the answer I made for Spotty above.😅👍
  25. Like
    seagate_surfer got a reaction from Gegger in The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us   
    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.
     
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