Tagged: hard drive cmr vs smr
Conventional magnetic recording, also known as CMR, and shingled magnetic recording, also known as SMR, are both examples of technologies that are used to physically store data on hard disk drives (HDDs).
When it comes to active storage, CMR hard drives are your best option. For instance, when the data needs to be read and written at extremely fast transfer rates or when there is an extremely large amount of data. This is the hard drive that is recommended for use in NAS devices, in particular when there is a mechanism for redundancy.
It is possible for it to become bogged down during large writes, at which point it will become extremely slow (on average, 10 MB/s). Everything works perfectly when it comes to reading, but the writing is a problem. Having said that, the SMR technology used in this drive makes it one of the best for $s/TB that can be found on the market; however, you shouldn’t expect it to have amazing performance.
The tracks on CMR hard drives are aligned next to one another with a slight space in between each one. This “conventional” method of manufacturing hard drives has been in use for several decades. In more recent SMR hard drives, in order to accommodate more tracks, the individual shingle segments have been designed to slightly overlap one another.
SMR hard disks are only useful for backing up data when a large amount of inexpensive storage space is required. You should get a CMR drive to use as your primary vehicle. However, you must not use SMR drives in Raid or in a network attached storage device (NAS). You will experience a significant decrease in performance as well as problems restoring raids.
Anything other than a system drive is a good candidate for SMR. Any storage device that anticipates a significant amount of writing should be an SSD anyway. A solid-state drive is the ideal storage medium for any drive that contains a sizeable amount of data. In order to achieve a higher density, SMR reduces the write performance, which is truly terrible.
According to Blocks & Files, SMR disks are designed to store more data on a disk platter than conventional magnetic recording (CMR) disks by partially overlapping write tracks. However, because of this design, the write performance of an SMR drive is significantly slower than that of a non-SMR drive.
The WD Red Pro has not been altered in any way; all that has been done is to make clear that the entire line is CMR. Customers should not buy WD Red SMR drives in the future if this clarification and renaming is implemented, as it will prevent them from doing so by accident.
Hard Drives Produced by Seagate Technology, Western Digital, and Toshiba All Conceal the Presence of SMR Technology. Recent investigations have revealed that Seagate Technology, Western Digital, and Toshiba incorporated a technology known as “Shingled Magnetic Recording” (SMR) into several models of their hard disk drives without informing end users of this fact.
Conventional magnetic recording (CMR)-based network attached storage (NAS) drives in the WD Red family now go by the name WD Red Plus. These drives come in capacities ranging from 1 terabyte to 14 terabytes.
The WD Blue and WD Black Series are both available in a form factor that is 2.5 inches. In the WD Blue 2.5″ HDD series, both the 1 TB drive and the 2 TB drive utilize the SMR technology. In contrast, the WD Black 2.5″ HDD series only has the 1 TB drive that employs the SMR technology in its single drive.
Drives that support drive-managed mode can be used with RAID, and this includes both DM SMR drives and HA drives. Despite the fact that RAID is compatible with both SMR and CMR drives, it is not a good idea to mix these two types of drives within the same RAID array due to the fact that their performance characteristics are very different from one another.
The NAS hard drives IronWolf and IronWolf Pro produced by Seagate have been tested and found to be free of SMR.
The WD Blue and WD Black Series are both available in a form factor that is 2.5 inches. In the WD Blue 2.5″ HDD series, both the 1 TB drive and the 2 TB drive utilize the SMR technology. In contrast, the WD Black 2.5″ HDD series only has the 1 TB drive that employs the SMR technology in its single drive.
Drives that support drive-managed mode can be used with RAID, and this includes both DM SMR drives and HA drives. Despite the fact that RAID is compatible with both SMR and CMR drives, it is not a good idea to mix these two types of drives within the same RAID array due to the fact that their performance characteristics are very different from one another.
The NAS hard drives IronWolf and IronWolf Pro produced by Seagate have been tested and found to be free of SMR.
The WD Blue and WD Black Series are both available in a form factor that is 2.5 inches. In the WD Blue 2.5″ HDD series, both the 1 TB drive and the 2 TB drive utilize the SMR technology. In contrast, the WD Black 2.5″ HDD series only has the 1 TB drive that employs the SMR technology in its single drive.
Drives that support drive-managed mode can be used with RAID, and this includes both DM SMR drives and HA drives. Despite the fact that RAID is compatible with both SMR and CMR drives, it is not a good idea to mix these two types of drives within the same RAID array due to the fact that their performance characteristics are very different from one another.
The NAS hard drives IronWolf and IronWolf Pro produced by Seagate have been tested and found to be free of SMR.