Sources Contact Advanced Search Tutorials

An Interest In:

Web News this Week

Search Archive

Some of Our Sources

View All Sources

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

April 19, 2020 07:34 am

Storage Vendors Are Quietly Slipping SMR Disks Into Consumer Hard Drives

"Storage vendors, including but reportedly not limited to Western Digital, have quietly begun shipping SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) disks in place of earlier CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) disks..." writes Ars Technica. "In addition to higher capacities, SMR is associated with much lower random I/O performance than CMR disks offer." Long-time Slashdot reader castrox shares their detailed report:Shingled Magnetic Recording is a technology that allows vendors to eke out higher storage densities, netting more TB capacity on the same number of platters — or fewer platters, for the same amount of TB. Until recently, the technology has only been seen in very large disks, which were typically clearly marked as "archival"... Storage vendors appear to be getting much bolder about deploying the new technology into ever-smaller formats, presumably to save a bit on manufacturing costs...[S]everal users have reported that these disks cannot be successfully used in their NAS systems — despite the fact that the name of the actual product is WD Red NAS Hard Drive. Citing a statement from Western Digital, the article concludes that "The writing on the wall here seems clear. Yes, Western Digital slid SMR drives into traditional, non-enterprise channels — and no, the company doesn't feel bad about it, and you shouldn't expect it to stop... "Western Digital doesn't appear to be the only hard drive manufacturer doing this," they write, noting that the storage-news web site Blocksandfiles.com "has confirmed quiet, undocumented use of SMR in small retail drives from Seagate and Toshiba as well."

Slashdot

Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by Geeknet, Inc..

More About this Source Visit Slashdot