Introduction to Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) Drives

[@beterhans]

Evil thing of SMR is not it's SMR it's the vendor never told you it's SMR!

[@jimmydandy9364]

Indeed but you can tell by the cache - example, a Seagate 2TB with 128mb of cache or more = SMR . If it has 64MB of cache it is a PMR

[@ronch550]

@@jimmydandy9364 for those who know, they can steer clear of SMR. The drive makers, however, know that the average consumer doesn't know, so they just keep pumping them out.

[@Baneslayer]

SMR Drives sound like an accident waiting to happen.... Sometimes you can come TOO CLOSE to the limit like the near zero spacings/forcing re-write of entire drives..... I'd rather have a more reliable drive with adequate spacing between tracks and utilize a tiny bit more physical space. 4:03 "The 'housekeeping' tasks that these drives must perform, result in highly unpredictable performance, unfit for enterprise workloads..... HA. I hit pause in the video to comment because these drives sounded like garbo to me.... I hit PLAY and then this flashes up...hahaha haha CONFIRMED. Thanks. Oh, they are also SLOW AS HELL.... A tiny bit of extra storage for MASSIVE LOSS in performance/reliability...... NO THANK YOU.

[@mygaffer]

Western Digital switched their Red drives to SMR without telling anyone, after people figured it out they had to admit it.

[@signaturemananzilashraf8708]

Smr drives r recoverable?????

[@wolfytechs]

Reliability isnt good when one line is damage the drive dies

[@JackQuark]

So SMR is OK for home use, but not good for enterprise use.

[@jimmydandy9364]

Neither - If you want a SYSTEM OS drive, get a non SMR drive or better yet, an SSD. SMR is not meant for continuous read / writes, eventually the performance will take a huge hit - not meant for running an OS on or applications that overwrite many files, etc. If you want a drive you will write once to but use mostly for reading, like an archive drive, then SMR will do fine. You will see 2TB+ drives with 128MB and 256MB cache, that's a giveaway that the drive is SMR. You will see the same versions of these drives with 64MB of cache, those are the normal (non SMR) drives, referred to as PMR. Gotta love how companies are cutting corners. If you can afford it, get a good SSD with high endurance for your workload.......back up on HD

[@JackQuark]

@@jimmydandy9364 Thanks. I use only SSDs in my PCs, then back up my data in an external HDD. The backup is quite slow, but it's fine since I can just leave it there transferring at night when I'm asleep.

[@jimmydandy9364]

@@JackQuark What kind of external HDD ? I use SATA3 HDD externally through Vantec USB3 enclosures, and I get sustained 190MB-200MB/s on my HDD during backup, if you are using USB2 enclosures or USB2 drives it will be very slow indeed.

[@JackQuark]

@@jimmydandy9364 I wrap a notebook sata 3 HDD in a USB2 closure. So it's much slower than yours.

[@ronch550]

I got sent an SMR drive 'by mistake' and the return process is a bit of a hassle. I'll mainly be using it for media like photos and videos, the usual stuff. Should I just suck it up?

[@MicrochipTechnology]

Kindly contact our client support team for direction on an exchange or return: www.microchipdirect.com/contact Thank you.

[@Zorcky-2C]

Very well explained, thank you

[@MicrochipTechnology]

You're very welcome!

[@gold-made]

Most External Hard Drives are SMR so if you have one the risk of Data being overwritten is Nonsense. But they are made more for Storage as opposed to PMR (different from SMR) which are almost always Internal PC drives which are specifically made to handle mutlitude of rewrites without data loss at all. Research SMR vs PMR.

[@zara330]

Spoke 5 minutes and failed to mention the key element that is the SMR drives are terrible in speed dropping from 28MB seed down to 1.5mb making them useless for personal use such as home NAS drive that is hosting my videos and photos to the entire house.

[@danielreichert7879]

zarash interesting. I did not know anything about smr-drives and bought this one: 2000GB Seagate Barracuda Compute ST2000DM008. As I am just found out it is uses also smr technology. So Without knowing, I was astonished by their reading and writing performance with large files which is never less than 120 MB/s usually it goes up to more than 200 MB/s. After 30 sec, performance may drop to 120, for me, that’s okay. I would have liked to know that in advance though. Were you talking about small files?

[@rawfish123]

@@danielreichert7879 You'll only see write performance penalties when you modify tracks that requires rewritting of tracks within a band. Like it was mentioned before, SMR drives perfectly fine for cold storage, the vendors just need to disclose this fact so we know what we are getting.

[@jimmydandy9364]

SMR is fine for cold storage, once you have written those photos and videos, you can access them fine at full speed. if you plan to do frequent rewrites and modifications, then SMR is not for you, otherwise for cold storage, write once, read most, you'll get the same speed. I have SMR drives storing my videos and have no issues reading them, I can even copy them without issue at near 200MB/s speeds. The issue is re-writing shingled tracks, not reading them.

[@icyhotonmynuts]

Reading speeds and hosting data is fine, it's writing or recording data where the problem arises. If you're archiving data, it'll be slow when you write to the drive, but reading will be no different than on other drives. It's fine as a home NAS if the NAS is for archiving data and not constantly being written to.

[@NativeVsColonial]

The narrator is just like reading all Google Definitions

[@ronch550]

SMR - Shitty Magnetic Recording

[@ronch550]

Without animation this really feels like someone is just reading a textbook to me.

[@relaxingnature2617]

Alot of the words she said are NOT real words