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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 do like the specs in the Seagate Ironwolf drives. The only problem for me would be that they're 5400-5900 until you get to their 8TB capacity. The last time I attempted to add space to my ReadyNAS, I tried using Ironwolf 2TB, and ReadyNAS wasn't at all happy about it because the existing drives were 7200rpm. That's what prompted me to fall back to the 2TB BarraCuda drives that were secretly running SMR.
Unless I were to rebuild the RAID from scratch, where I'd replace all four drives at once, then restore from backup, I'd be replacing them one at a time. In that situation, the RPM's must match.
To me, any real nas-capable drive will be 7200rpm because they always have been--the first drives that were used in production raids were 7200rpm, then 10000rpm, and today as high as 15000rpm. This is still evident today by the fact that no sas drive can be purchased less than 7200rpm.
The slower rpms were always for consumer drives or other such rubbish that couldn't take the duty cycles. Granted, today these drives can also run cooler, use less power, etc, while keeping very nice data transfer rates...if they aren't smr--which is the new game that is being played to undermine the value of these drives as 7200rpm replacments.
The problem is the division between consumer and professional drives that started decades ago are now merging again. And if the drives aren't really that different, the prices shouldn't be either. Well, the one way to make those prices stay different is to cheapen out the cheap drives again--hence smr. But I think it's a bit futile as ssd costs are dropping fast enough that by the time smr drives are accepted, they'll also be gone.
Well, I just replaced all four of the Seagate BarraCuda 2TB drives (SMR) with Western Digital Black (WD2003FZEX) 2TB drives (CMR). I replaced them one at a time, letting the ReadyNAS fully sync before adding the next. I then did a Defrag and Balance. So far, so good. Time Machine backups have sped up considerably. I wish I'd been aware of the SMR/CMR difference when I install the Seagate drives a year ago. Lesson learned. Perhaps Netgear should remove SMR drives from the "Approved Drives" list?
Good to hear. :) I don't really think the vendors can keep up with drive changes. Even synology and qnap's drive lists don't list drives that work correctly, so a lot of it is up to the user unfortunately.
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