Seagate now has 2.5" Barracuda Pro HDDs (7200 rpm with 7mm Z height)

[cbn]

Very surprised to see the following drives called 2.5" Barracuda Pro show up on the Seagate website:

https://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/hdd/barracuda/#specs-2-5-pro

With 128MB cache and 1TB platter I would think these are SMR , but on page 9 of the following link it says perpendicular recording :

https://www.seagate.com/files/www-c...op-fam/barracuda_25/en-us/docs/100818135e.pdf

EDIT: These are SMR drives. see post #3.

 

[cbn]

Thinking about fast 2.5" HDDs, I have been wondering (for sometime now) how this would affect recording in an intermediate codec like DNxHR (Think external recorders made by companies such as Atomos, etc.)

http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/White_Paper/DNxHR-Codec-Bandwidth-Specifications

^^^^ Notice the Bandwidth requirements at various levels for DNxHR HQX.

So the question then becomes can this drive at 160 MB/s peak record 104 MB/s (needed by DNxHR HQX at 4K30) throughout the entire platter?

Being the fact this is PMR rather than SMR I think It could probably do it....but at the same time I do wonder how much extra margin the recorder might need? Or does it not need much margin?

Next question I have:

Can we expect 2.5" Helium 7200 rpm PMR next? This with two or three 1TB platters rather than one?

 

[Billy Tallis]

With 128MB cache and 1TB platter I would think these are SMR, but on page 9 of the following link it says perpendicular recording :

Page 6 clearly states that these are SMR drives:

Shingled magnetic recording with perpendicular magnetic recording heads/media.

SMR and PMR are not mutually exclusive. All modern hard drives use PMR heads, but only some drives overlap tracks (SMR).

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I remember when "perpendicular" drives were being promoted. I think I saw the catchy Hitachi web-page with the "singing" disk drive some years ago.

I've been re-thinking my drive choices for desktops, notably with my Skylake (sig) rig, which I "started building" in October, 2016. It has at least two SATA HDDs, but they're both 2.5" drives. One of these was a Seagate Barracuda, but it wasn't a "Barracuda Pro." It has the 128MB built-in cache. I'm wondering if the model I have wasn't a 5,400 RPM drive. It didn't much matter to me, because I'm caching SATA devices to NVME and RAM.

I was almost planning today to post a thread, asking people for their opinions about using 2.5" laptop drives the way I've done so far.

But none of them have missed a lick. They're running in my box for regular file and program file usage, for media files, and I have one which is a backup device for scheduled Macrium. I have a couple HGST's that are 1TB; the rest are either of two 2TB models (including the Barracuda) from Seagate.

Some of these drives throw a yellow-bang event-log warning at startup, and I thought I'd determined that the events in the logs were benign. It certainly seems to be the case that they must be, because the only thing I've noticed about the drives' performance are the boot-time yellow-bangs.

 

[cbn]

Page 6 clearly states that these are SMR drives:



SMR and PMR are not mutually exclusive. All modern hard drives use PMR heads, but only some drives overlap tracks (SMR).

Thank you for pointing that out.

From now on I'll be on the lookout for the term conventional magnetic recording when trying to differentiate SMR from non-SMR.

 

[cbn]

Okay, so now that we now these are SMR I still wonder how these would do for sequential writes when used in a External recorder like the Atomos Ninja Flame?

As a reference point here is the Sequential write and read performance on a 2TB 2.5" Firecuda which also uses SMR:


https://www.eteknix.com/seagate-firecuda-2tb-2-5-sshd-review/7/

My guess based what we are seeing above is that 500GB Seagate Barracuda Pro 2.5" (which is 1 platter, 2 head design short stroked 50%) should be able to handle 104 MB/s sequential write for the entire capacity.

But then looking at these results I don't see the necessary consistency:

https://www.back2gaming.com/reviews...ate-firecuda-2tb-2-5-st2000lx001-sshd-review/

With that noted, I would think 2.5" Barracuda Pro should be able record 1080p 60 FPS DNxHR HQX though for the entire capacity though, even the 1TB version.