Rich Freeman wrote: > On Mon, Jan 6, 2020 at 9:18 AM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Rich Freeman wrote: >>> On Mon, Jan 6, 2020 at 8:25 AM Mick <michaelkintz...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> If they are used as normal PC drives for regular writing >>>> of data, or with back up commands which use rsync, cp, etc. then the disk >>>> will >>>> fail much sooner than expected because of repeated multiple areas being >>>> deleted, before each smaller write. I recall reading about how short the >>>> life >>>> of SMR drives was shown to be when used in NAS devices - check google or >>>> youtube if you're interested in the specifics. >>> Can you give a link - I'm not finding anything, and I'm a bit dubious >>> of this claim, because they still are just hard drives. These aren't >>> SSDs and hard drives should not have any kind of erasure limit. >>> >>> Now, an SMR used for random writes is going to be a REALLY busy drive, >>> so I could see the drive being subject to a lot more wear and tear. >>> I'm just not aware of any kind of serious study. And of course any >>> particular model of hard drive can have reliability issues (just look >>> up the various reliability studies). >>> >> I ran up on this article however, it is a short time frame. Still might >> be a interesting read tho. >> >> https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2019/07/smr-what-we-learned-in-our-first-year/ > That article makes no mention of reliability issues with SMR. In > fact, they mention that they want 40% of their storage to be on SMR by > now. Clearly they wouldn't be doing that if the drives failed > frequently. > > Note that they did modify their software to have write patterns > suitable for SMR. That is the key here. You absolutely have to > engineer your application to be suitable for SMR, or only choose SMR > if your application is already suitable. You can't just expect these > drives to perform remotely acceptably if you just throw random writes > at them.
True but they likely have the drives that have it handled in software, host managed I think they call it. Another article I read was talking about three different approaches to SMR. The drive I have is likely done on the drive itself, device managed, which is good for me. The ones in the article appear to manage the data transfer in software. I noticed they also use SSDs as sort of a temporary storage, if I understood that correctly. I think they did that to speed things up a bit. >> I'm still a bit curious and somewhat untrusting of those things tho. >> Regular hard drives go bad often enough as it is. We don't need some >> fancy unknown thing inserted just to add more issues. Sort of reminds >> me of the init thingy. Each thing added is another failure point. > Obviously they're relatively new, but they seem reliable enough. > They're just not suitable for general purpose use. > >> I'm going to test my ebay skills and see if I can find some non-SMR >> drives. It sounds like some require some research to know if they are >> or not. :/ > That's pretty simple. Find a drive that looks reasonable > price/capacity/etc-wise. Then just google the model number to confirm > it isn't SMR. > > If you're in the US though you're probably best off shucking drives > from Best Buy these days. A drive that costs $350 as a bare drive > will get sold for $180 in a USB enclosure. I think it is just market > segmentation. They want to get top dollar from enterprise users, and > they aren't going to be shucking drives from Best Buy bought on "limit > 1 item per customer" sales. By shucking I'm getting 12TB red drives > for less than the cost of a 6TB green drive. Just be aware that if > your PSU is old you'll need to tape over some of the SATA power pins. > New PSUs - even cheap ones - haven't given me any trouble. > > I'm sure there are more up-to-date guides as these days the drives are > 12TB, but here is the gist of it: > https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7fx0i0/wd_easystore_8tb_compendium/ > > If you aren't in the US I have no idea whether equivalent deals are > available. That subreddit is a good place to go for info on cheap > hard drives though. > I've been noticing that too. Only bad thing is, I can't always tell what is in the enclosure. Sometimes the info is given but sometimes not. I've also seen a few people complain that what they got was not the model of drive they thought. I suspect one can get a adapter for that P/S connector. I can't recall when I got the P/S I currently have but it is a few years old. I think it's a ThermalTake or something like that. I got to overclockers forum where they list good ones. I'm almost certain it has standard connectors which may be a problem. I've read about having to cover up a pin or something but never seen one in person. This is a educational thread. I didn't even know SMR was a thing until this thread came along. Dale :-) :-)
