SMR hard drives vs higher end pmr/cmr hard drives (NAS/enterprise) for archival/cold storage.

[Pc6777]

I recently got some cheaper Seagate barracuda SMR  hard drives for archival purposes Seagate BarraCuda 4TB 5400 RPM 3.5" Hard Drives - Newegg.com  and   Seagate BarraCuda 8TB 5400 RPM 3.5" Hard Drive - Newegg.com

I know they are smr, but for now I am just using them for archival/cold storage so speed doesn't matter to me. Did I make a mistake, would have been getting enterprise/higher end drives been better for this use case? can higher end drives retain data longer? and if at some point I retire these from archival, will they be fine for gaming, watching videos, I will read from them heavily and write to them moderately. anyone have experience with these drives or smr drives in general? how long do they last? I don't care about write speed, just durability and read speed. if I need to do a write that's large I can just let it go overnight or while at work, not an issue for me. so these drives will sit in a bin most of the time unless I retire them from archival in the future, I will pull stuff off occasionally, and maybe rewrite the data once a year so theres no "bit rot".

[Jumballi]

SMR has 2 major down sides;

1, they’re a lot slower

2, you cannot turn the pc off immediately when moving data

 

If you can deal with those 2, then it’s going to work just the same for just as long as a CMR drive.

[Pc6777]

41 minutes ago, Jumballi said:

SMR has 2 major down sides;

1, they’re a lot slower

2, you cannot turn the pc off immediately when moving data

 

If you can deal with those 2, then it’s going to work just the same for just as long as a CMR drive.

I've always assumed they were probably less durable because the write head has to do more work beacuase of the rewriting adjacent tracks, but maybe it will only have a significant effect in durability if you do a lot of random writes. I will be rewriting the data on them probably once a year to avoid bitrot, it will just be one massive write that's a few terbytes, how do smr drives handle this type of workload? Do smr drives do fine if you write a bunch of data on an emty drive once, is it only random writes were they suffer in preformance a lot and do that rewriting stuff? So after I move the data, is it ok to turn off after that, I don't want to turn it off while stuff is still in cache or something, then when I turn on the drive a year later the stuff that was in cache when I turned it off is corrupted. And I don't care about speed on hdds, as long as it's fast enough to load open world games and is durable that's enough for me. For speed/boot I won't bother with higher end hard drives, I will just use solid state. And smr drives are just as good/fast for reading data, correct? if you need a monitor and keyboard an mouse, a 1080p 60 hz monitor and a cheaper keyboard/mouse setup will run you 150-200. 

[Jumballi]

1 hour ago, Pc6777 said:

...

SMR drives are terrible for random read and write, with a single file transfer at once being the best case scenario.

 

SMR drives might not be able to fit the data you’re transferring on a specific part of the drive it needs to go on, so it’ll write it somewhere easier and then move the data later, it’s best not to disconnect power or the drive for up to a day in some very bad circumstances.

 

SMR are ok for sequential reads, but gaming requires random reads, which the SMR is terrible at. You shouldn’t use an SMR drive if you want to use it as a game drive.

 

With these limitations, you can see why most professionals use SMR for archiving only, since enterprise is unlikely to turn off computers and its usually very cheap compared to other drives in a back up solution.

[Pc6777]

1 hour ago, Jumballi said:

SMR drives are terrible for random read and write, with a single file transfer at once being the best case scenario.

 

SMR drives might not be able to fit the data you’re transferring on a specific part of the drive it needs to go on, so it’ll write it somewhere easier and then move the data later, it’s best not to disconnect power or the drive for up to a day in some very bad circumstances.

 

SMR are ok for sequential reads, but gaming requires random reads, which the SMR is terrible at. You shouldn’t use an SMR drive if you want to use it as a game drive.

 

With these limitations, you can see why most professionals use SMR for archiving only, since enterprise is unlikely to turn off computers and its usually very cheap compared to other drives in a back up solution.

For now it's just cold storage and will sit on a shelf, but I was thinking maybe in a few years when I retire them from cold storage I may do some gaming in it. And is a yearly rewrite good enough to keep the drives from getting corrupted? How often do I need to spin it up to not run into problems?

[Jumballi]

On 4/20/2021 at 10:58 PM, Pc6777 said:

For now it's just cold storage and will sit on a shelf, but I was thinking maybe in a few years when I retire them from cold storage I may do some gaming in it. And is a yearly rewrite good enough to keep the drives from getting corrupted? How often do I need to spin it up to not run into problems?

Sorry I for the few days delay,

Please don’t do gaming on these drives, especially once you retire them down the line.

 

Mechanical drives don’t need to be rewritten, the data should be safe so long as it’s far from magnets. However this doesn’t equate in cosmic rays, where a random bit could be flipped causing the whole file to corrupt. This is why you should have back ups of back ups if they’re intended to last decades, and those back ups should be redundant. Look into bit rot for more info on that.

 

All of that being said, if the data isn’t that important, as in not being used in a professional or business setting, a single drive kept secure should be more than enough, maybe using a cloud provider for the extra important stuff that needs to be double secure.

[Pc6777]

14 hours ago, Jumballi said:

Sorry I for the few days delay,

Please don’t do gaming on these drives, especially once you retire them down the line.

 

Mechanical drives don’t need to be rewritten, the data should be safe so long as it’s far from magnets. However this doesn’t equate in cosmic rays, where a random bit could be flipped causing the whole file to corrupt. This is why you should have back ups of back ups if they’re intended to last decades, and those back ups should be redundant. Look into bit rot for more info on that.

 

All of that being said, if the data isn’t that important, as in not being used in a professional or business setting, a single drive kept secure should be more than enough, maybe using a cloud provider for the extra important stuff that needs to be double secure.

I also use verbatim blu ray m-discs in case a file gets corrupted, but those are a last resort because they take a while to read, I have a few hard drives with all the files and the discs so I should be good.