What consumer hard drives have SMR platters?

[cbn]

1.) I know the following Seagate 2.5" do:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/10760/seagate-launches-firecuda-sshds-up-to-2-tb-smr-8-gb-of-nand

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1075...5-mobile-hard-drives-with-up-to-5-tb-capacity


2.) I am pretty certain Seagate 3.5" 5400 rpm desktop drive (ST4000DM04) does a well:

https://www.seagate.com/www-content...cuda-new/files/barracuda-ds-1900-5-1702us.pdf

4 heads and 2 Disks
256MB cache

2TB SMR platters right?


3.) WD10SPZX (Western Digital Blue 2.5" 7mm 1TB)??

https://www.wdc.com/products/internal-storage/wd-blue-mobile.html#WD10SPZX

https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_assets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-771437.pdf

^^^^^ Interesting that it has 128MB cache. The other models (ranging from 250GB to 2TB capacity) have either 8MB or 16MB cache. (SMR drives need higher than normal size caches to work properly)

EDIT: The following link lists an areal density of 1060 Gbit/in2---> https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https://forum.51nb.com/thread-1757824-1-1.html&edit-text=&act=url (high end PMR or lower end SMR?)

EDIT2: As a reference point the following HGST drive has SMR @ 1034 Gbit/in2---> https://www.anandtech.com/show/11901/western-digital-now-shipping-14tb-hgst-ultrastar-hs14

EDIT3: As a reference point Toshiba's MQ04ABF100 is the first 2.5" hard drive with 1TB platter and 128MB cache to have PMR---> https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...ives-have-smr-platters.2525313/#post-39180126 (So 1TB 2.5" platter with 128MB cache doesn't always mean SMR at this point) (EDIT: See post #13 for correction....as well as post #11 and post #12)

 

[cbn]

2.) I am pretty certain Seagate 3.5" 5400 rpm desktop drive (ST4000DM04) does a well:

https://www.seagate.com/www-content...cuda-new/files/barracuda-ds-1900-5-1702us.pdf

4 heads and 2 Disks
256MB cache

2TB SMR platters right?

The 3TB 3.5" Barracuda (currently listed as ST3000DM007) in the link below now has 256MB cache and 3 heads/2 platters:

https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/3-5-barracuda-3tbDS1900-10-1710US-en_US.pdf

So same 2TB SMR platter, but only 1 side of the second platter is being used.

 

[VirtualLarry]

https://promotions.newegg.com/seaga....com/seagate/17-7357/1920x360.jpg&icid=416360

12TB Seagates, which use SMR?

 

[cbn]

https://promotions.newegg.com/seagate/17-7357/index.html?cm_sp=Homepage-Top2016-_-P5_seagate/17-7357-_-https://promotions.newegg.com/seagate/17-7357/1920x360.jpg&icid=416360

12TB Seagates, which use SMR?

These all have 1.5TB PMR platters (eight total with Helium):

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11903/seagate-ships-consumerfocused-12tb-helium-drives

With this mentioned, according to this review there will be a 14TB Iron Wolf (non-Pro) by the end of the year.

Although using more platters could result in reduced performance levels the exact opposite has been happening for quite some time now and thus the new IronWolf 12TB hard disk drive is the fastest overall SATA model in our charts. True the performance gap compared to the 10TB model is far from large but it’s there and getting a faster drive is never a bad thing. Leaving out however the 2TB increase in capacity thanks to the extra platter everything else however remains the same including its endurance numbers (180TB/y – 1m MTBF), rotational speed (7200RPM) and cache (256MB). Perhaps what’s more interesting is that Seagate will be releasing a 14TB variant really soon so we can’t wait to see if that model will produce even higher read and write performance numbers.

14TB Iron Wolf (non-Pro) with SMR? The PCB used on the 12TB Iron Wolf (non-Pro) does have room for more cache according to the same review:

As usual at the rear we see a small PCB with all the modules placed on the other side for increased protection (we also see the same empty spot on the upper right corner which may one day be used for extra cache (or an SSHD model).

 

[Elixer]

I really wish they wouldn't sell these to consumers.
They just don't know about the limitations these things have, and the box doesn't mention anything that would steer people away from these things.

To them, a HD is a HD.

 

[cbn]

https://promotions.newegg.com/seagate/17-7357/index.html?cm_sp=Homepage-Top2016-_-P5_seagate/17-7357-_-https://promotions.newegg.com/seagate/17-7357/1920x360.jpg&icid=416360

12TB Seagates, which use SMR?

These all have 1.5TB PMR platters (eight total with Helium):

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11903/seagate-ships-consumerfocused-12tb-helium-drives

With this mentioned, according to this review there will be a 14TB Iron Wolf (non-Pro) by the end of the year.



14TB Iron Wolf (non-Pro) with SMR? The PCB used on the 12TB Iron Wolf (non-Pro) does have room for more cache according to the same review:

The incoming 14TB Iron Wolf drives (mentioned in the above post) could have PMR as Showa Denko releases 9th Generation PMR platters at 1.8TB capacity for 3.5":

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1206...h-gen-pmr-tech-enables-14-tb-pmr-hdds-in-2018

P.S. The article above also mentions Toshiba's MQ04ABF100 1TB 2.5" hard drive with 128MB cache has 1TB 9th gen PMR platter.

http://www.sdk.co.jp/english/news/2017/26793.html

SDK’s 2.5-inch 1 TB HD media have been adopted into Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation’s hard disk drive (HDD), “MQ04ABF100,” for client. SDK has started supplying its 2.5-inch HD media for this application, using the ninth-generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology.

 

[cbn]

ST8000DM004 (8TB 3.5" Barracuda) and ST6000DM003 (6TB 3.5" Barracuda) now listed with 4 and 3 platters respectively (ie, 2TB platters) and 256MB cache:

https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/3-5-barracuda-3tbDS1900-9-1710US-en_US.pdf

NOTE: The Seagate Barracuda Pro 8TB has a very similar part# (ST8000DM0004) and also has 256MB cache but has PMR platters.

 

[cbn]

A new Seagate 2TB 3.5" Barracuda drive (ST2000DM008) is now listed with 1 platter/2 heads and 256MB cache:

https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/3-5-barracudaDS1900-10-1802US-en_US.pdf

Interestingly this one lists sequential read at 220 MB/s....so this must be a 7200 rpm SMR drive.

 

[cbn]

Seagate 2.5" Barracuda Pro drives with SMR show up:

https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...-pro-hdds-7200-rpm-with-7mm-z-height.2539964/

 

[pilgrimshoes]

I really wish they wouldn't sell these to consumers.
They just don't know about the limitations these things have, and the box doesn't mention anything that would steer people away from these things.

To them, a HD is a HD.

There are a lot of write once or rewrite infrequently uses that they might be useful for. A backup disk or a second hard drive.

But I'm puzzled by the way all the Seagate SMR/TGMR drives are sold for any and all uses. They've dropped the "archive" idea in the product description and categories. For example, the Barracuda Compute drives. Re-using an old brand name adds to the confusion, because the Barracude brand meant something else. Based on my limited knowledge, those don't seem at all suitable for use as a single drive or a primary drive. What am I missing?

 

[pilgrimshoes]

1.) I know the following Seagate 2.5" do:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/10760/seagate-launches-firecuda-sshds-up-to-2-tb-smr-8-gb-of-nand

This Seagate product manual from August 2016 says the 2TB ST2000LX001 Firecuda is a 5400 RPM perpendicular drive.

https://www.seagate.com/www-content...top-fam/laptop-sshd/en-us/docs/100802299c.pdf

But this product manual from February 2017 says "Shingled magnetic recording with perpendicular magnetic recording heads/media," but then gives the Recording Method as Perpendicular.
https://www.seagate.com/www-content...top-fam/laptop-sshd/en-us/docs/100802299e.pdf

Anyone know what that really means?

You'd think they could at least change the model number if they're going to change the technology.

 

[cbn]

This Seagate product manual from August 2016 says the 2TB ST2000LX001 Firecuda is a 5400 RPM perpendicular drive.

https://www.seagate.com/www-content...top-fam/laptop-sshd/en-us/docs/100802299c.pdf

But this product manual from February 2017 says "Shingled magnetic recording with perpendicular magnetic recording heads/media," but then gives the Recording Method as Perpendicular.
https://www.seagate.com/www-content...top-fam/laptop-sshd/en-us/docs/100802299e.pdf

Anyone know what that really means?

You'd think they could at least change the model number if they're going to change the technology.

The following post clears things up:

https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...-rpm-with-7mm-z-height.2539964/#post-39340397

 

[MarionGrandJ]

1.)

EDIT3: As a reference point Toshiba's MQ04ABF100 is the first 2.5" hard drive with 1TB platter and 128MB cache to have PMR---> https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...ives-have-smr-platters.2525313/#post-39180126 (So 1TB 2.5" platter with 128MB cache doesn't always mean SMR at this point)

Toshiba MQ04AB series are SMR drives: https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/content/dam/toshiba-ss/shared/docs/product/storage/HDD-MQENA.pdf

 

[Jose112]

In fact, we already know from Western Digital’s announcement of a 14 TB HDD that the upcoming new-gen 3.5” SMR platters have a capacity of 1.75 TB per platter, so we expect Seagate to deal with disks of around the same areal density/capacity.

 

[VirtualLarry]

https://www.legitreviews.com/seagate-barracuda-st5000dm000-5tb-desktop-hard-drive-review_161241

This article (old) is interesting. I put together one of my first 4-bay NAS units, with four of these 5TB Seagate ST5000DM000 (or 1) drives, that were "shucked" from some Seagate Expansion Desktop External HDDs. I bought them for $110 or so ea., so I did get a deal, but if they are in fact SMR as the comments in that article indicate, then that WOULD EXPLAIN the strangeness that I sometimes see with the performance of that NAS unit. (It would explain why I only get 30MB/sec to it, but the drives pass all SMART and RAID scrub tests, they don't appear to be failing.)

 

[cbn]

https://www.legitreviews.com/seagate-barracuda-st5000dm000-5tb-desktop-hard-drive-review_161241

This article (old) is interesting. I put together one of my first 4-bay NAS units, with four of these 5TB Seagate ST5000DM000 (or 1) drives, that were "shucked" from some Seagate Expansion Desktop External HDDs. I bought them for $110 or so ea., so I did get a deal, but if they are in fact SMR as the comments in that article indicate, then that WOULD EXPLAIN the strangeness that I sometimes see with the performance of that NAS unit. (It would explain why I only get 30MB/sec to it, but the drives pass all SMART and RAID scrub tests, they don't appear to be failing.)

The author of that article thinks it might be the firmware.....

Not the fastest hard disk drive out there and it would be our guess that the firmware on this drive is not optimized for normal desktop use as it is usually used in an enclosure through the USB 3.0 interface.

Here is what Synology says about SMR:

https://originwww.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Storage/PMR_SMR_hard_disk_drives

However, when the written data is to be edited or overwritten, the write head will not directly record the data on the existing magnetic track to avoid causing damage to the adjacent magnetic track. The edited data will be written on an empty area of the disk, while the original magnetic track with the old data will be kept unchanged temporarily. When the HDD is idle, it will take the reorganization mechanism where the old data bits on the original magnetic track will be erased automatically and become available again for any new data.

In view of the reorganization mechanism mentioned above, the idle time is essential for an SMR drive. If an SMR drive undertakes long-time and intensive work of overwriting, it will not have enough idle time to reorganize the magnetic tracks, and there will be increasingly more such magnetic tracks being kept unchanged temporarily. In consequence, the SMR drive may need to write new data and reorganize the old magnetic track at the same time, resulting in an impact to some extent on the read/write performance. Vendors have developed firmware for SMR HDDs to optimize the reorganization mechanism in terms of the impact on read/write performance during overwriting tasks.

(With the new Barracuda Drives being having a URE spec increase I do wonder how well the firmware on those drives works with RAID-5? Also RAID-5 with Optane or a NAND SSD as cache? I'd imagine for many tasks having read/write cache would allow for plenty of idle time for processing. Furthermore write cache will help buffer small writes which should also reduce disk activity)