Selling hard drives with SMR technology is the norm. For a manufacturer it means being able to save costs on making a hard disk because SMR technology allows them to increase the size of packets, or in other words to increase the capacity of hard drives without physically changing them. However, using this technology has some drawbacks for users, and the fact that manufacturers haven't warned before about it, at least, is a serious situation.
What does it mean that your hard drive is SMR?
SMR technology is based on the fact that it balances writing layers in hard disk flats. To be frank, when tracks are usually written to one hard disk after leaving less space in between, and SMR is inserted into multiple layers, which saves a lot of space and thus provides greater power to the hard disk.
Use of this technology has several implications for users:
- Low performance: There is a marked decrease in performance when hard disk is SMR. For example, in WD models the speed drops from 210 MB / s to 150 MB / s, and this is in theoretical data because where the actual is still too low.
- RAID problemsAnother problem is that the tracks are overlapping that it presents problems in RAID environments, and especially when creating RAID, as data matching errors are detected and the task is incomplete, causing possible data loss.
As published by WD at the time, its WD Red hard drives are intended for home users and SMBs, especially NASs with 1 to 8 bays, and are optimized for uploading up to 180 TB operations per year. Because of how SMR technology works, since the data is written in free disk fields to re-organize with DMSMR, the disk needs to "rest" in order for this to happen and be able to automatically rearrange the data, which means it is not good for high-quality workloads.
Hard drive list using SMR technology
There is a way to tell if the hard drive is an SMR if you have it on the NAS or have access to the UNIX command console. Just enter the following command:
hdparm -I / dev / sda | grep TRIM
Where to mount the disk (sdb, sdc, etc.). SMR hard drives have TRIM support, so when listed by SMR. If it does not appear in the list, it is probably CMR and you have no problem.
However, this is a list of models that use SMRs that are recognized by different manufacturers.
Toshiba:
- P300 6TB
- P300 4TB
- DT02 6 TB
- DT02 4 TB
- DT02-V 6 TB
- DT02-V 4 TB
- L200 2TB
- L200 1TB
- MQ04 2TB
- MQ04 1TB
WD (Western Digital):
- WD20EFAX (Red)
- WD30EFAX (Red)
- WD40EFAX (Red)
- WD60EFAX (Red)
- WD20EZAZ (Blue)
- WD60EZAZ (Blue)
- WD10SPZX (Blue)
- WD20SPZX (Blue)
- WD10SPSX (Black)
Seagate:
- ST2000DM008 (Barracuda 2 TB)
- ST4000DM004 (Barracuda 4 TB)
- ST8000DM004 (Barracuda 8 TB)
- ST5000DM000 (Desktop 5 TB)
- ST8000AS0003 (Exos 8TB)
- ST6000AS0002 (Archive v2 6TB)
- ST8000AS0002 (Archive v2 8 TB)
