Seagate Shipping SMR Drives

[BFG10K]

http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_pledges_20tb_shingled_magnetic_recording_hdd_by_2020

http://www.seagate.com/tech-insight...agate-smr-master-ti/?cmpid=friendly-_-smr--us

It'll be interesting to see which direction Western Digital takes to overcome the limitations of PMR. I don't think Helium is a long-term solution.

 

[fleshconsumed]

Interesting. Seems we've been stuck at 4TB forever. Makes me wonder if/how/when we'll get bigger hard drives and if they're actually going to be affordable.

 

[aigomorla]

gogogo quantium bigfoot drives again!!!

 

[glugglug]

gogogo quantium bigfoot drives again!!!

That probably has more potential than you think...
A taller drive form factor means a smaller portion of the volume is used up by the top and bottom covers of the drive and the controller. You would be amazed how many platters a full height drive can have. Most people today don't realize those big 5.25" bays you are using for the DVD burner are actually half height.

I bought a full-height 5.25" 2.7GB SCSI drive back back in 1992 or 1993, back when 240MB was still considered "big". To get that 2.7GB capacity the drive had 21 PLATTERS. Imagine what capacity such a monster would have today!

 

[tweakboy]

Seagate is a cheap company. I urge you to stick with WDC or Samsung. GL

 

[Soulkeeper]

hmm looks like there could be performance compromises with this approach
write amplification being introduced to the equation

 

[aigomorla]

That probably has more potential than you think...
A taller drive form factor means a smaller portion of the volume is used up by the top and bottom covers of the drive and the controller. You would be amazed how many platters a full height drive can have. Most people today don't realize those big 5.25" bays you are using for the DVD burner are actually half height.

I bought a full-height 5.25" 2.7GB SCSI drive back back in 1992 or 1993, back when 240MB was still considered "big". To get that 2.7GB capacity the drive had 21 PLATTERS. Imagine what capacity such a monster would have today!

the problem with those drives tho was the mass in which the motor had to spin those massive disks.

 

[Haserath]

Luckily reads don't get affected by this.

I wonder if they'll offer hard drives with and without SMR for those that could still use them? Though Samsung Vnand will be catching non SMR drives if they can't move past 1TB per platter.

hmm looks like there could be performance compromises with this approach
write amplification being introduced to the equation

At least hard drives don't have an endurance problem there. But write performance will be 1/3 or less as the drive fills up.

Imagine random write performance instead of sequential performance. :/

 

[glugglug]

At least hard drives don't have an endurance problem there. But write performance will be 1/3 or less as the drive fills up.

Imagine random write performance instead of sequential performance. :/

It may be worse than that even. If they just port the wear leveling algorithms will lead to fragmentation of the physical data (even if the logical data is not fragmented). For SSDs, that isn't so much of an issue because they are basically random access. Read performance is going to take a big hit as well from the fragmentation.

Ultimately I think these drives are going to need to be busy doing a defrag of the logical->physical sector remapping (and therefore the data fragments that the OS doesn't know about) during any idle time they can. And will probably need the firmware to ignore the OS telling it to park.