Sadly This Hard Drive Is Designed For Servers, Not Your Laptop

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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May 9, 2000
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It’s just plain evil of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies to even show off this 10K gigabyte storage monster since it will not be available to end users for years. The 10TB SMR HelioSeal HDD will be shipping out later this year to selected servers running special software.

But there's no reason to think the technology won't be ready for desktop PCs and eventually laptops in a few years.
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I'm not sure there's a big market for 3.5" laptop hard drives anymore. ;)
 
As a consumer I would never want an SMR drive. The only way I could see SMR being practical is if they made every 3rd track empty, so you'd write a maximum of 2 sectors per write. By keeping the performance, you would only gain 33% more storage instead of twice the capacity.
 
-PK- said:
As a consumer I would never want an SMR drive. The only way I could see SMR being practical is if they made every 3rd track empty, so you'd write a maximum of 2 sectors per write. By keeping the performance, you would only gain 33% more storage instead of twice the capacity.
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From the reading I've done - the consumer level SMR drives (the 8TB one from Seagate) has a 20GB "buffer" zone on the drive so that you can dump whatever you need to the drive, and afterwards it sorts itself out with onboard cleanup (actually writing the shingled tracks)

there was a huge in depth review of it somewhere on the web recently... forget the site at the moment because I'm starving.

It would be the perfect setup/tech for my huge collection of 1080p bluray encodes... each sucks down about 15-20GB, but I'm currently sitting on about 6TB worth. I just don't feel like paying 300 dollars for this drive just yet though.

In a server environment where there can be perhaps a few TB of "buffer" space, then the system doles out data to the SMR drives once it needs archiving the drives can do their cleanup and writing in the background... I can see that working great performance and price wise.

It's called archive drive for a reason :)
 
-PK- said:
As a consumer I would never want an SMR drive.
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I got six of the Segate 8TB SMR drives and they're perfectly usable. The write speed is pretty decent and the general performance isn't that much different to non SMR drives.

Besides, how often to you actually write to a hard disk? You stick stuff on it and then leave it there. Anything that that requires fast read/write speeds you do on an SSD.

For archival storage I'll always take capacity over performance.
 
collegeboy69us said:
From the reading I've done - the consumer level SMR drives (the 8TB one from Seagate) has a 20GB "buffer" zone on the drive so that you can dump whatever you need to the drive, and afterwards it sorts itself out with onboard cleanup (actually writing the shingled tracks)

there was a huge in depth review of it somewhere on the web recently... forget the site at the moment because I'm starving.

It would be the perfect setup/tech for my huge collection of 1080p bluray encodes... each sucks down about 15-20GB, but I'm currently sitting on about 6TB worth. I just don't feel like paying 300 dollars for this drive just yet though.

In a server environment where there can be perhaps a few TB of "buffer" space, then the system doles out data to the SMR drives once it needs archiving the drives can do their cleanup and writing in the background... I can see that working great performance and price wise.

It's called archive drive for a reason :)
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That is why hybrid arrays of SSD and large spindles are so popular now. The SSD injest data super fast and then the cheap and large platters can pull it in at a normal pace.
 
SMR is just asking for someone or something to overwrite the firmware and just utterly fck the drive.

The real problem is that magnetics aren't exactly solid. So SMR tracks could start unevenly be re-writen. I wonder what kind of coating they are using and if there's been enough real time MTBF.
 
LBJM said:
Or non SSDs either ;) I have yet to see a 4TB drive in 2.5" form.
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Even 2.5 is a dying size. It's all going to m.2, etc these days. 2.5" is an external drive now. :)

All of my modern computers run ssd now. Mechanical drives is just storage. These sorts of drives can stay as server drives as far as I care. I have no need to store stuff as anything tv, etc, I just watch and delete, never going to watch a 2nd time. Movies I pick up on Blu-ray.
 
I'm not a huge fan of the Seagate SMR drive I recently purchased. I'm a patient guy, but it took forever to write the 5TB, with speeds frequently dropping below 20MB/sec, jumping to 100+MB/sec and back and forth.
 
timta2 said:
I'm not a huge fan of the Seagate SMR drive I recently purchased. I'm a patient guy, but it took forever to write the 5TB, with speeds frequently dropping below 20MB/sec, jumping to 100+MB/sec and back and forth.
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Not a fan of Seagate drives period.

Almost every server drive that's failed at work has been a Seagate drive (Dell OEM'd), even though they only make up about 25% of the drives. They usually make it past the warranty period, but after 3-4 year they start dropping.

And Dell wonders why I don't like buying their over priced drives, and instead buy WD or Hitachi Enterprise level drives when I need upgrade the server storage.
 
viscountalpha said:
SMR is just asking for someone or something to overwrite the firmware and just utterly fck the drive.

The real problem is that magnetics aren't exactly solid. So SMR tracks could start unevenly be re-writen. I wonder what kind of coating they are using and if there's been enough real time MTBF.
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You don't know what you are talking about. I've worked on this drive technology specifically. The media, heads, and drive electronics are exactly the same as on their PMR drives. Only the firmware is different. In the lab we could switch the same drive from PMR to SMR and vice versa with a firmware download and reformat.

The SMR drives use an indirection system much like SSDs to keep track of the LBAs as they move around the drive. New sectors are written to non-shingled cache areas spread around the drive (to help with write performance), and then later moved to shingled areas when there is enough data/time. Large sequential writes can be written directly to shingled tracks.

SMR drives are not designed or optimized for speed, but for bulk storage where writing is done much less often than reading. Think media servers, etc. Expect to see even larger drives (up to 50TB) where all the tracks are shingled and are treated as WORM type media, except that they can be reformatted (which erases all the data). I don't know anything about any specific projects here, just extrapolating on the basic technology.
 
3 10TB drives please ;). Theres 4, 6, and even 8 TB but 10TB is the point where you definitely gotta buy :cool:
 
rivertown_rat said:
You don't know what you are talking about. I've worked on this drive technology specifically. The media, heads, and drive electronics are exactly the same as on their PMR drives. Only the firmware is different. In the lab we could switch the same drive from PMR to SMR and vice versa with a firmware download and reformat.

The SMR drives use an indirection system much like SSDs to keep track of the LBAs as they move around the drive. New sectors are written to non-shingled cache areas spread around the drive (to help with write performance), and then later moved to shingled areas when there is enough data/time. Large sequential writes can be written directly to shingled tracks.

SMR drives are not designed or optimized for speed, but for bulk storage where writing is done much less often than reading. Think media servers, etc. Expect to see even larger drives (up to 50TB) where all the tracks are shingled and are treated as WORM type media, except that they can be reformatted (which erases all the data). I don't know anything about any specific projects here, just extrapolating on the basic technology.
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Sounds like you don't know what your talking about. So tell me why i'm so wrong instead of quoting freely available information next time.
 
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