If customers cared enough, wouldn’t someone just market their drives as PMR and this would solve itself? It would make sense to have a lower cost alternative that would fulfil most consumer needs though.
Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too
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Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too
#22Is there a trusted hdd manufacturer left? I'd like to not spend several weeks on research when I again get the urge to rebuild the NAS.
Wikipedia has a great diagram showing the process of hard disk drive manufacturer consolidation that tells a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Driv... Now it's a perfect oligopoly: Seagate, WD, and Toshiba, just like the stories from many other industries.
Its a guaranteed 30% profit margin industry with very high patent moat. No incentives to change anything.
Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too
#23Is there a trusted hdd manufacturer left? I'd like to not spend several weeks on research when I again get the urge to rebuild the NAS.
Shouldn't their 5-year warranty drives still be good?
My favorite idiom comes from China: Pay a lot, cry once.
Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too
#24Adding 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...
Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too
#25Is there any way small-scale ~4 drive NAS or file server systems can accommodate SMR drives in software? It looks like they're going to need to do so...
A small-scale NAS implies home usage, which again implies plenty of idle time. With plenty of idle time, the SMR drive should perform decent enough, as the drive has enough time to shuffle stuff between the persistent cache region and the SMR region.
Or at least that's the theory.
Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's competition. Every cost cutting tech gets adoption except for boost the main muggle specs like capacity. On the SSD side we have DRAMless and TLC. The annoying thing is that unless the government forces disclosure, the honest manufacturers are the ones hurt, having to start advertising "no SMR!" to differentiate, like the organic/health food products in the grocery store that have to list all the poisons they do…
> On the SSD side we have DRAMless and TLC. I'm happy to buy a DRAMless + TLC SSD for my boot disk on my web browsing PC (not development), it is a reasonable compromise for a lower price. Same for SMR drives, I won't have problems with them as backup disks. I think the problem here is SMR drives are sold without disclosure , and it has already created some serious problems in practice. > What’s worse, they’re shippi…
> 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.
Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too
#27Is there any way small-scale ~4 drive NAS or file server systems can accommodate SMR drives in software? It looks like they're going to need to do so...
A small-scale NAS implies home usage, which again implies plenty of idle time. With plenty of idle time, the SMR drive should perform decent enough, as the drive has enough time to shuffle stuff between the persistent cache region and the SMR region. Or at least that's the theory.
They have problems being chucked out of pools when resilvering, ie. when added to the pool, so the general usage pattern isn't so much the issue as is the way the filesystem or RAID controller reacts to them. In particular I think people have had problems with ZFS because the resilvering process involves a lot of random writes, and once the PMR cache on the drive is full, it will stop responding as it flushes the cache for long enough for ZFS to think it's dead.
Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too
#28If customers cared enough, wouldn’t someone just market their drives as PMR and this would solve itself? It would make sense to have a lower cost alternative that would fulfil most consumer needs though.
I can't speak for the drives mentioned in this article, but the WD Red drives were de facto marketed as PMR since the Red line was marketed by WD as the best drives for NAS. It'd be a little like if you went down to the your local Ferrari dealership and bought a Ferrari only to find that they'd started selling a model that couldn't reach 60mph.
Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
>On the SSD side we have DRAMless and TLC. Are you sure you're not talking about QLC? Current TLC drives can be pretty decent in terms of write speed and endurance.
Yeah. QLC is bad but mature TLC with a DRAM cache can be an excellent choice b
QLC with a decent SLC cache seems to work just fine as well, for most consumer purposes - see drives like the sabrent Rocket-Q
Re: Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too
#30Are the disk vendors publishing performance metrics that are being violated by the use of SMR technology? Or is this just one of those cases of performance generally not being as good as it used to be, and customers becoming reliant on past behavior despite the lack of an explicit performance promise from the vendors?