Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 130 posts

Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too

#71

Post by [deleted] »

cthalupa wrote: post #62
magicalhippo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They rebuiild (sic) for a while (1-2 hours), then throw errors and get kicked out of the set. I don't doubt it, but do you have the source for that? I read stories about people using the Seagate Archive disks in RAIDZ and it worked fine for them.

Mine completed the rebuild, but it took over 2 weeks vs. the usual 1-2 days my prior WD Red 6TBs had completed in. This has accelerated my move to enterprise 16TB drives, because I really don't want to expose myself to data loss on rebuilds taking hugely extended times.

[deleted]

Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too

#72

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

loeg wrote: post #43
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were bought by WD a few years back.

2012 in fact. I thought it was much more recent, myself.

They lead the Backblaze charts since years, so having been bought doesn't seem to matter much?

Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too

#73

Post by moonbug »

m0zg wrote: post #60
dragontamer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only maybe... 3 or 4 elements of HDD designs worth talking about. * CMR/PMR drives -- Classic hard drive you've been buying for the last 30 years. Not much to say about it. * SMR Drives -- "Shingled" has very poor write performance, but adds 20% more capacity at lower costs. For "write once, read many" workloads, like archival or backups. This is because "Shingled" drives write data on top of the old data,…

I don't know if there's any truth to this, but I've read NAS drives also declare themselves "bad" much more readily through SMART, so you replace them sooner.

The point is that the fault recovery is delegated up for handling at the array controller level, rather than being processed by the drive.

Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too

#74

Post by auxym »

dragontamer wrote: post #44
canada_dry wrote: post #24

Adding to this confusing debacle is how HDDs are now being marketed like running shoes: one type for running, one for squash, one for tennis, one for basketball...

There are only maybe... 3 or 4 elements of HDD designs worth talking about. * CMR/PMR drives -- Classic hard drive you've been buying for the last 30 years. Not much to say about it. * SMR Drives -- "Shingled" has very poor write performance, but adds 20% more capacity at lower costs. For "write once, read many" workloads, like archival or backups. This is because "Shingled" drives write data on top of the old data,…

> For "write once, read many" workloads, like archival or backups.

My backup drive gets written to nightly, but reads are very rare (only in case of data loss).

Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too

#75

Post by otterley »

cthalupa wrote: post #63
uluyol wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this a question of throughput? What is the bandwidth of SMR and what workloads can't it support that PMR can? I primarily use my NAS for backups and don't care too much about how slow they are, they finish quickly enough.

Try to do a resilver with SMR drives. I just got fucked by this change in models - I had an array full of 6TB WD Reds, had one fail, ordered a replacement. Rebuilding the RAID-Z3 took over 2 weeks. Previous replacements had taken under 2 days - usually under 1. Passing SMR drives off without saying anything, especially when that exact model had been a PMR drive prior, is incredibly anti-customer.

The model number did change. The older drive was a WD60EFRX; the newer SMR drive is a WD60EFAX. Am I mistaken?

Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too

#76

Post by wtallis »

auxym wrote: post #74
dragontamer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only maybe... 3 or 4 elements of HDD designs worth talking about. * CMR/PMR drives -- Classic hard drive you've been buying for the last 30 years. Not much to say about it. * SMR Drives -- "Shingled" has very poor write performance, but adds 20% more capacity at lower costs. For "write once, read many" workloads, like archival or backups. This is because "Shingled" drives write data on top of the old data,…

> For "write once, read many" workloads, like archival or backups. My backup drive gets written to nightly, but reads are very rare (only in case of data loss).

The key aspect of WORM here is that the data you write is not modified in-place or overwritten in part; it stays put until deleted. That's true of most backup strategies, whether or not they generate a lot of read traffic to compute incremental backups. The "read many" part of WORM is usually never about how many actual reads are performed, but about the capability to handle them better than multiple writes.

Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too

#77

Post by wtallis »

m0zg wrote: post #60
dragontamer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only maybe... 3 or 4 elements of HDD designs worth talking about. * CMR/PMR drives -- Classic hard drive you've been buying for the last 30 years. Not much to say about it. * SMR Drives -- "Shingled" has very poor write performance, but adds 20% more capacity at lower costs. For "write once, read many" workloads, like archival or backups. This is because "Shingled" drives write data on top of the old data,…

I don't know if there's any truth to this, but I've read NAS drives also declare themselves "bad" much more readily through SMART, so you replace them sooner.

NAS drives will more readily return errors for individual IO commands. That's not the same thing as the drive saying it has failed generally, though primitive RAID controllers often treat any IO failure as a whole-drive failure.

Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too

#78

Post by p1necone »

wtallis wrote: post #57
wjnc wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read parent as saying that trying to cut corners with SMR is even more stupid seeing that the HDD-market is becoming 'more enterprise' on average.

SMR drives have more of a place in the enterprise market than the consumer market, just like tape drives. Enterprise/datacenter customers tend to have a much better understanding of their workloads and are more able to determine when they have a use case for niche technologies. They also have a greater ability to deploy tiered storage with SSDs in front of hard drives to cover up the performance limitations.

Yeah but they need to be told the drives are SMR to be able to make that decision.

Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too

#79

Post by loeg »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #72
loeg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2012 in fact. I thought it was much more recent, myself.

They lead the Backblaze charts since years, so having been bought doesn't seem to matter much?

They were osntensibly a fully independent subsidiary (for antitrust reasons) through 2015.

For the years after that: yes, it seems WD did not want to destroy the high-quality reputation and engineering excellence they paid $4B for.

Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too

#80

Post by loeg »

londons_explore wrote: post #69
loeg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a single Log structure -- the shingle stripes are on the order of 128 MB of or so. Any CoW filesystem can relatively easily adapt to this kind of system; in-place filesystems are basically boned on SMR. The CoW filesystem aren't going to be fast on SMR, mind you, just not quite as awful.

I believe these SMR drives don't allow direct access to "write a block here". They try to write your writes to a staging area first, and them move them later. The SATA/SCSI spec, together with operating systems, block device interfaces, and filesystems, would all need to be updated to have more parameters to correctly handle SMR drives properly. Since hard drives are going out of fashion and architectural changes lik…

Host-managed SMR came first. When it wasn't being adopted because it sucks, drive-managed SMR like the crap WD is selling as Reds came about.

SCSI and SATA and operating systems already have support for host-managed SMR — the name used in this context is "ZONE" and those changes happened around 5+ years ago.

https://zonedstorage.io/introduction/smr/#scsi-standard-zbc

Post reply on HN