SMR Drives.

[epikgamerwmp]

I need to get a new hard drive. I was thinking about getting a Seagate Barracuda 4Tb but all of the reviews said to not buy because they are SMR drives.

 

Could someone please explain what an SMR drive actually is and what the downsides that everyone talks about actually are.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Did you watch the ltt video about smr drives? They have a good explanation.

 

What are you using the drive for? For desktop use, the smr drives are fine.

[epikgamerwmp]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

What are you using the drive for?.

My current drives are all full so I need a larger capacity drive to replace the disks in my Desktop.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, epikgamerwmp said:

My current drives are all full so I need a larger capacity drive to replace the disks in my Desktop.

but what are you storing on the drives.... How much io do you need from it? Is it most reads or writes?

 

It probably won't matter that its smr.

[epikgamerwmp]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

but what are you storing on the drives.... How much io do you need from it? Is it most reads or writes?

 

It probably won't matter that its smr.

storing on the drives - mostly games, archiving video files.

[minibois]

1 minute ago, epikgamerwmp said:

I need to get a new hard drive. I was thinking about getting a Seagate Barracuda 4Tb but all of the reviews said to not buy because they are SMR drives.

Could someone please explain what an SMR drive actually is and what the downsides that everyone talks about actually are.

Here are two videos from Linus on SMR drives:

Spoiler

 

In short, a hard drive has pieces on it that are magnetized or not magnetized. These form a large string of 0's and 1's that in the end form a file. That's basically how drives work.

Normally these pieces are laid out flat on the disk, but HDD manufacturers are running into the issue that they want to increase drive capacity, but there is simply no more room for more bits and they could not make the bits smaller.

Genius idea: overlay these magnetized bits. The 'read' head of a HDD is about half the size of the magnetized bits, so even if the bits overlap; they can still be read just as fast! The write head is larger though, so when you need to rewrite a bit, that has another bit laying over it; you need to read that bit, store it, overwrite, but if there is another bit over that.. etc. etc.

 

So random writes to an SMR drive are going to be really slow.

That makes them less suitable for something like RAID 5/6 where you might need to write an entire disk at once, or when you are using your HDD in a 'random' fashion.

 

In short: you need to always have a backup for your data, but for certain purposes; SMR is not desireable.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, epikgamerwmp said:

storing on the drives - mostly games, archiving video files.

Then I wouldn't worry about smr. it only really causes issues with extended random writes.