On 02/01/2020 19:12, Rich Freeman wrote:
For reads they're completely normal. For sequential writes to unused space they're completely normal. For random writes or overwrites they are significantly different from traditional hard drives.
That's why the "S" stands for "shingled" (which means "overlapped", think of a shingled roof - which is your normal overlapping tile jobbie).
The point of a shingled drive is that it has a narrow read head - let's call it one unit wide. But a write head is larger, lets call it three units wide. If each track is one unit wide - the correct size to be read - then writing a track will destroy two tracks.
So the write head lays down data in concentric rings, and CAN'T overwrite data - it has to wipe everything and rewrite it. So as mentioned before you really do not want these drives for random writes - think of them as a bit like a random-write tape drive ie you can get away with it but you're better off not trying.
And yes - the 8TB capacity gave it away - I think the largest "normal" drives available are 4TB at present ... anything bigger must be shingled.
Cheers, Wol
