The three major HDD manufacturers are selling slower drives, without telling us

[seagate_surfer]

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 

On 4/18/2020 at 8:23 AM, hitardo said:

Quotes

Geizhals, a German-language price comparison website, lists seven Seagate SMR drives. 

- Barracuda 2TB – 7,200rpm – SATA 6gig – model name – ST2000DM008

- Barracuda 4TB – 5,400rpm – SATA 6gig – ST4000DM004

- Barracuda 8TB – 5,400rpm – SATA 6gig – ST8000DM004

- Desktop HDD 5TB – 5,900rpm – SATA 6gig – ST5000DM000

- Exos 8TB – 5900rpm – SATA 6gig –  

- Archive v2 6TB – 5,900rpm – SATA 6gig – ST6000AS0002

- Archive v2 8TB – 5,900rpm – SATA 6gig – ST8000AS0002

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.

 

[sof006]

10 hours ago, davide30541 said:

but is this not a software issue? its an hdd that works, only in a way that nas OS are not expecting. they treat these new hdds as broken because they behave differently from the ones in there already. once nas OS is aware that these drives are diferent this will become a non issue? just thinking here. 

No thats not how it works. This is implemented at a hardware level. No amount of software can correct a hardware issue. Do a google for Shingled Magnetic Recording. 

 

EDIT: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-disks-are-being-submarined-into-unexpected-channels/

 

Worse of all, these manufacturers are not labeling these drives correctly. Both drives mentioned in this article are both 2TB Red drives but only one of them is CMR and the other is SMR... totally unable to tell which is the best one. Someone unsuspecting would purchase the wrong one and discover its incompatible. HDD manufacturers should not be allowed to get away with this.

[Arika]

First of all, thank you for this amazing write up, it was an incredibly interesting read

 

Secondly, and just to confirm:

10 minutes ago, seagate_surfer said:

So don't do that and buy NAS drives if you are going to put them inside a NAS device.

11 minutes ago, seagate_surfer said:

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. Nobody will guarantee you so many years of guarantee if we were not sure that the unit will last much more than that lapse of time.

So the Ironwolf series do use SMR (due to them having a 3 year warranty) and the Ironwolf Pro do not? or both NAS drives do not use SMR at all?

 

[Kilrah]

Nice summary indeed.

 

47 minutes ago, seagate_surfer said:

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.

That's the whole problem discussed here, WD having silently pushed SMR drives into their NAS lineup, on models that are of low enough capacity that SMR isn't required and at the same price as CMR ones. You buy what is supposed to be good for the purpose and get something that isn't. Seagate might not be guilty of this but it's obviously sparking industry-wide scrutiny.

 

 

47 minutes ago, seagate_surfer said:

the product list

To me those "solution oriented" marketing guides are worthless when they aren't backed by tech info, i.e. pretty much always. If you don't mention what characteristics you consider appropriate for what use then marketing can then shove any tech into any category as fits the current availability, rather than what actually matters. Of course the tech info should be secondary and not invade the guides for clueless consumers, but should be available. And detailed enough to matter.

[leadeater]

27 minutes ago, seagate_surfer said:

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.

Just to add to this Seagate has been (one of, but a huge one) the chosen OEM by all the desktop, server and enterprise storage vendors for decades through the use of standard model supply contracts and also custom models with custom firmware to support their offerings. I've been using Seagate disks for as long as I've been able to use a computer.

 

Of all the desktops I've managed throughout my career Seagate has never been a standout issue or abnormal failure rate, of all the servers and enterprise storage again Seagate has never been a problem and is actually a preferred choice.

 

There is one instance where there was a bit of a problem long ago with I think it was the ES or ES.2 3TB drives have higher amounts of failures and lots of our clients had these in their NAS's, no data loss ever occurred or array failure due to this issue. Could be wrong on the details, it was around 2010-2012.

 

I doubt any high volume data recovery firm cares what the specific disks are or has any real opinion on the matter, they will see a lot of Seagate disks just by the nature of the brand being highly common.

[Kilrah]

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

Otherwise how do they work out a speed that is actually meaningful to a buyer? 

The same way the same manufacturers have no problem giving them for SSDs?

Everybody gives sequential read, sequential write and IOPS for SSDs. If we had the same numbers for HDDs this discussion wouldn't be happening.

[leadeater]

13 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

That's the whole problem discussed here, WD having pushed SMR drives in their NAS lineup. You buy what is supposed to be good for the purpose and get something that isn't. Seagate might not be guilty of this but it's obviously sparking industry-wide scrutiny.

Well there is an assumption going on that SMR is actually a problem here. All NAS drives sold are designed for that usage regardless of being CMR or SMR. SMR NAS drives have a larger CMR/PMR zone and large caches. If there actually is an issue I would be more inclined to point towards a firmware problem.

 

If you want to know if a disk is utilizing SMR technology there are tech specs that give it away, and physical but I'll cover that after as it's less reliable.

 

If you see a disk with 256MB cache, less than 7200 RPM, sustain OD performance less than 200 MB/s then it is most likely a disk using SMR in some form.

VN0033 likely pure CMR/PMR and VN001 likely CMR/PMR+SMR.

 

Now if you see an 8TB disk that is half height that is almost certainly an SMR disk.

[Curious Pineapple]

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

 

I get the hatred for the term "upto", but that really isn't the cause of the issue here.  Nor is it blanket get out of jail free card.    There is a specific problem with products of this nature in that manufacturers can't actually tell you how fast the drive will work in your end use conditions, only give you a best case scenario.   Otherwise how do they work out a speed that is actually meaningful to a buyer?  how do they not spec it to look slow when it can perform faster but don't want to invoke legal issues.  you know why we have a bakers dozen right?, it's the same thing with performance metrics.  an "Upto" figure doesn't land them in consumer law issues while any other figure might.   The best they could do is measure ever one's real world performance and advertise it as an average.  But you know how well that would go down.

Except it is a get out of jail free card. Car manufacturers do it all the time. MPG figures are calculated with a just broken in engine, using the highest quality oils they can get, with tyres inflated to pressure at operating temperature, on a rolling road, with optimum air temperatures and no real world conditions. In reality you'll never hit them figures.

 

A mimimum guarenteed sustained speed would be a far better metric to make available and truely honest.

[Kilrah]

23 minutes ago, leadeater said:

VN0033 likely pure CMR/PMR and VN001 likely CMR/PMR+SMR.

If I see that chart I'd attribute the slower speed to the VN001 being 5400rpm vs 7200, not to SMR...

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

If I see that chart I'd attribute the slower speed to the VN001 being 5400rpm vs 7200, not to SMR...

It's 5400 because it's SMR, like I said it's one of the spec factors that you can look at to know if it is or isn't.

 

Edit:

You can also just go by weight, but I don't consider physical parameters as accurate and technical ones.

VN001 is lighter because it has less platters as it's got a higher aerial density. 

[Kilrah]

"Consumer" drives have always been 5400rpm, but have never been SMR until now...

[mr moose]

30 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

The same way the same manufacturers have no problem giving them for SSDs?

you mean the upto rating they give them?   That's the same thing.

27 minutes ago, Curious Pineapple said:

Except it is a get out of jail free card. Car manufacturers do it all the time. MPG figures are calculated with a just broken in engine, using the highest quality oils they can get, with tyres inflated to pressure at operating temperature, on a rolling road, with optimum air temperatures and no real world conditions. In reality you'll never hit them figures.

 

A mimimum guarenteed sustained speed would be a far better metric to make available and truely honest.

how do they guarantee a minimum,  if they just pick a low figure then their competition will just bet it by a small number and then they lose sales.  There is no easy way to market these product, be honest and maintain sales.    Like most products, if the marketing was honest no one would buy anything.

[leadeater]

11 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

"Consumer" drives have always been 5400rpm, but have never been SMR until now...

Consumer drives have not always been 5400, for the longest time they were 7200. Laptops were the first to widely use 5400. Most of the Seagate Barracuda drives 3TB below are 7200, all WD Black are 7200. WD Blue has 7200 and 5400.

 

NAS drives, which what we are talking about, come in many different RPM from 7200 to 5900 to 5400 etc.

 

Also SMR is in more disks than people actually know about and have been for more than a year. Seagate Barracuda 2TB ST2000DM005 is from what I can tell SMR and was introduced April 2019.

 

Yes it can be hard to tell, should it actually matter? No actually. The drives working as designed should have no significant performance differences and definitely should not be getting kicked out of drive arrays. Performance will not cause that either.

 

Edit:

Would I buy one you might be wondering? No, but I have always made it a habit of reading the spec sheet of any disk I intend to buy and look at every spec and the sub model differences, I've always done this.

[Kilrah]

8 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Also SMR is in more disks that people actually know about and have been for more than a year.

A year is short, and it's basically what people are finding out now. Until then it was not really a thing apart from specifically labeled archival drives.

 

Again SMR was always pointed out as being either a cost saving measure or a way to get more capacity. A 2TB 3.5" drive doesn't need SMR for capacity, and from what I can see the SMR variants aren't really cheaper than the CMR variant at retail. So people get less and it's normal they're frustrated.

 

8 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Consumer drives have not always been 5400, for the longest time they were 7200

In the past 10 years 5400 has been the standard for desktop drives. I remember the pain trying to get 7200rpm ones a few years ago, almost impossible to find any. Only the WD blacks and nobody carried them. 

[leadeater]

18 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

A year is short, and it's basically what people are finding out now. Until then it was not a thing apart from specifically labeled archival drives.

 

Again SMR was always pointed out as being either a cost saving measure, a way to get more capacity. A 2TB 3.5" drive doesn't need SMR for capacity, and from what I can see the SMR variants aren't really cheaper than the CMR variant. So people get less and it's normal they're frustrated.

And how long do you think SMR technology has actually been around for? How long do you think it takes for a new technology to get deployed in to a product stack? It isn't some random coincidence that it's been making it's way in to disks at the consumer level since around mid/late 2018.

 

And of course it's a cost saving measure, it's also primarily and why it got developed a capacity increase measure for enterprise. You really think consumer workloads is a driving factor in HDD development for the last 10 years? No it is not.

 

A 2TB drive may not need SMR however you're forgetting that a 2TB SMR drive has less platters in it thus Seagate can produce more disk of all sizes if more disks use less platters if they don't need them. So a 2TB drive using SMR allows Seagate to sell more disks without having to increase the production rate of drive platters.

 

Demand of disks is actually still very high which keeps cost high, there is still a price minimum but disks over 4TB aren't at that but they aren't getting cheaper either because of overall market demand, not for 4TB+ specifically but for disks overall and those need to be manufactured. Seagate would rather put platters in to 16TB high margin enterprise disks than your 2TB or 4TB desktop or mid range NAS disk.

 

18 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

In the past 10 years 5400 has been the standard for desktop drives. I remember the pain trying to get 7200rpm ones a few years ago, almost impossible to find any. Only the WD blacks and nobody carried them. 

Only in large capacity ones and that is intentional due to the large number of platters in large disks which puts stress on the motors and bearings and causes failure, the solution to that is to lower the RPM. That is why WD Black for a really long time did not come in larger capacity sizes, PMR/CMR aerial density needed to increase enough to allow it without adding platters. This is why you still cannot buy a WD Black larger than 6TB, and even that is a more recent addition to that product lineup.

 

Large capacity 7200 RPM disk do exist but those are all high end enterprise drives and come at a price premium.

 

There are reasons why products have certain specs, generic statements don't fit well. WD product range is much smaller than Seagate and not all suppliers stock all the Seagate models so unless you go checking product range spec sheets you may have no idea there is actually a disk that ticks all the boxes you want.

[hitardo]

Guys, I am not against SMR.

 

And there is space in the market for that

 

The thing is:

They decreased  the performance of the drives, without (1) telling consumer, and without (2) changing the product name / branding / family.

 

I reiterate: the main goals of these OEMs - maybe in conjunction - is to:

a) Cheap out on production costs;

b) Enlarge to the difference between the non-Pro and the Pro version, in order to force SOHO and enthusiast users to buy the more expensive Pro versions.

 

Moreover, this is greatly complicated when people have RAIDs already implemented.

What are you supposed to do?!

Change your entire RAID, and buy all new HDDs?

 

This is not acceptable, especially because of the two reasons I stated on the second paragraph.

[hitardo]

16 hours ago, mr moose said:

 

I'm not sure I see a problem here,  Every time I buy a new hard drive (about 1 year on average) I don't assume the one I am getting is identical to one I bought a year or 3 ago.  Technologies and manufacturing processes change.  if you buy an i7 you wouldn't assume it was the same as last gens i7 would you?

Processors change series (or generation).

This way, you have a way to tell the difference.

 

HDD have families, but not generations.

This is wrong doing.

 

8 hours ago, Kisai said:

 

The problem is that if they never advertise the technology used, they never have to walk it back. This is what government regulations are for. To avoid these bait-and-switch products from existing.

 

The average consumer only cares about the capacity, not the specs, and the specs don't really mean anything. 

Not exactly.

The perfomrnace - which they advertise - decreased significanlty.

Thus, this is not acceptable.

[amsga]

I apologise in advance if I seem dense...

 

I kinda understand how SMR impacts performance due to the amount of rewriting in random IOs due to the layering (forgive me for using incorrect term).

I understand why they would be used for cold storage backup rather than running in some NAS or server.

 

Should I start worrying about the WD Black or Seagate Barracuda series as well?

[hitardo]

29 minutes ago, amsga said:

I apologise in advance if I seem dense...

 

I kinda understand how SMR impacts performance due to the amount of rewriting in random IOs due to the layering (forgive me for using incorrect term).

I understand why they would be used for cold storage backup rather than running in some NAS or server.

 

Should I start worrying about the WD Black or Seagate Barracuda series as well?

If a company decreases performance of a product, without saying anything, everyone should starts worrying.

Moreover, this could be extended to every product of those companies.

 

This is particularly worrying, as many people seems to be ok with this - as seen in this thread.

Which I personally think is not seeing the big picture.

Because tomorrow, this may occur with your HDD, Processor, Smartphone, or Camera.

 

Furthermore, we all should show our opinion on this to the OEMs, and to our local authorities.

I will surely do that.

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, Kilrah said:

"Consumer" drives have always been 5400rpm, but have never been SMR until now...

Uh no?

 

Consumer drives have been 7200rpm 3.5" drives in non-OEM desktops, 5400rpm 2.5" drives in laptops. 5400rpm drives also are the vast majority of USB hard drives that aren't NAND flash. OEM-desktops traditionally only used 5400RPM in the same machines that would ship without a dedicated GPU. Though many $300-$600 SFF machines are typically 5400 RPM so they're quiet. Everything else is 7200RPM 

 

What you find is that since nearly everything uses NVMe now, mid/high-end gaming/engineering laptops and desktops also come with a mechanical 1-2TB drive that's intended for you to use as your data drive. 

[seagate_surfer]

9 hours ago, Arika S said:

First of all, thank you for this amazing write up, it was an incredibly interesting read

 

Secondly, and just to confirm:

So the Ironwolf series do use SMR (due to them having a 3 year warranty) and the Ironwolf Pro do not? or both NAS drives do not use SMR at all?

 

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.

[hitardo]

36 minutes ago, seagate_surfer said:

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 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 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. 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 for what it was meant to be used, nothing less and nothing more.

Thank you for you great insight.

And I agree with you: consumer needs are significantly different from the enterprise.

 

And, NAS - for consumers - is not a cold storage, in my opinion.

NAS is accessed more frequently.

And WD Red (up to 6GB) are commonly used in NAS application.

 

And your text confirms my theory:

They want to separate further their non-Pro to their Pro families of products.

 

Cheers.

[seagate_surfer]

5 hours ago, amsga said:

I apologise in advance if I seem dense...

 

I kinda understand how SMR impacts performance due to the amount of rewriting in random IOs due to the layering (forgive me for using incorrect term).

I understand why they would be used for cold storage backup rather than running in some NAS or server.

 

Should I start worrying about the WD Black or Seagate Barracuda series as well?

You will be wise enough to know as long as you can pick the right drive, Would you drive a minivan down the race track? Disk drives keep track of various drive usage such as power-on hours, lifetime writes and lifetime reads from the host computer.  With this data we can calculate an Annualized Workload Rate using this simple formula:

Annualized Workload Rate =

(Lifetime Writes + Lifetime Reads) * (8760 / Lifetime Power On Hours)

8760 are the number of hours in a year.  The Workload Rate becomes an annualized average expressed as TB/year.

Disk drives are specifically designed to perform to up to certain levels of Workload Rates. These are called Workload Rate Limit s (WRL).  Here are the common Workload Rate Limits for the common disk drive design segments:

 

Segment                                            Workload Rate Limit
Standard                                                               <55 TB/yr
NAS, Surveillance archive.                                 <180 TB/yr
Enterprise NAS (Nearline Lite)                            <300 TB/yr
Enterprise Capacity (Nearline)                            <550 TB/yr

 

What happens when you use a standard HDD in heavy workloads, remembering that these hard drives are meant to operate 5 days a week, 8 hours a day? You guessed it. Premature failure... You may use SeaTools Bootable for internal drives and SeaTools for Windows on the external drives to measure your drive’s Annualized Workload Rate by running the Drive Information test. In the table above, compare your Workload Rate to the corresponding Workload Rate Limit. If your value is below the WRL then the drive activity is supported by the design. If the value is above the WRL then the reliability of the drive will begin to decline:

• SeaTools | Seagate Support US

 

[seagate_surfer]

7 hours ago, leadeater said:

-I doubt any high volume data recovery firm cares what the specific disks are or has any real opinion on the matter, they will see a lot of Seagate disks just by the nature of the brand being highly common.-

Yes, that is a perspective and you are right! If it were the case and the drives were that bad, no one would buy hard drives anymore.

[TechyBen]

10 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Of course not since the domestic lineups never included SMR drives before... Their use was limited to those archival drives, alledgedly becasue they were considered too poor to even go in domestic drives and their use required disclosure of that feature. The problem is that they decided to silently change this stance...

IIRC some 2.5inch external (internal too?) consumer drives did use SMR. No idea if they mention it in a seperate whitepaper/spec sheet to their website, but one I have I *was* able to find out. So some manufactures not mentioning it is bad. Why? It's physical and material performance related.

 

The car manufactures don't mention what material my brake pedal is made of... but if they turned it to plastic, which does not like high heels and breaks, people might get annoyed for not having a memo!