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Forum Discussion
shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard drive fiasco - inquiring on recommendations
It's been a while since I jumped on the forum but what brings me here is my NAS volume utilization is hovering around 65%. I believe it's good until 80% and then starts to bark at you about storage ...
I am late to this discussion here, but the topic of customers getting screwed by secret SMR garbage drives really has me ticked off. I used to be a big fan of WD drives, but after they started lying to their customers about this stuff, I would not buy another of their WD-branded pieces of junk even at half price. SMR drives are a HUGE problem in some applications, so being able to know for sure which drives are junk is kinda important! One thing I have read is that disgustingly long sequential write speed is an indication of SMR junk.
I do not know the right answer for all drives, but at least for my NAS, I am now only using Seagate IronWolf drives. Seagate has publicly stated that none of the IronWolf series of drives will ever be SMR, so I am trusting that statement when buying drives for NAS and DVR use.
I doubt that I will ever trust buying a WD branded drive again - they have had their chance, and they proved that they were cheats and liers on this subject. They only started publishing the truth after they were caught.
Well, I think that none of the major vendors have been forthcoming (until recently) about their SMR drives. According to Seagate, the BarraCuda 2TB drives, four of which are running in my ReadyNAS, have always been SMR. They only acknowledged it with a spec sheet update last April.
Here are some useful links provided by Bombich Software (Carbon Copy Cloner for Mac) from the major drive vendors indicating which of their product lines use SMR vs. CMR. Apparently, SMR drives don't (among many other issues) play well with Apple's newer drive layout (APFS).
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