Q: Any recommendation for _CMR_ external USB3 HDD for 10TB+?

[CZI]

Today I realized that I made mistake on order of HDD.
Any recommendation for _CMR_ external USB3 HDD for 10TB+?


It seems I got SMR drive and not CMR.
As I learned today, my old drive issue was based on SMR.

I was wondering why one of my external drive is getting file corruptions.
It is Seagate 8TB External drive (STGY8000400) which I bought 14 month ago.

I thought I just got bad drive, but it seems I'm getting the SMR issue.
It is used over 50% of capacity already and getting lost folder and files.

Following quote is from Amazon's Seagate HDD.
I'm getting exact same issue and lost many folder/files already.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08XKMBTXH/

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Avoid SMR Drives
By Sandy (WA) on July 13, 2020
My 8TB drives were fine until they got more than half full. Writes became so slow I had to do all my work on other drives and schedule a time to transfer results to the big drives. It would take forever as the drives thrashed trying to re-shingle data. Terrible performance. And then I started getting corrupted files, so I had to dump these things and replace with CMR drives. It's fine if you only need half the drive's capacity, but who buys a large drive for half its capacity? Avoid SMR technology. Seagate should be ashamed of themselves for not revealing that this is an SMR product.
====


ref thread:
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/11/3283695676286140004/

[ulia]

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with SMR if you understand what you are buying. SMR drives often come in at nearly half the price of CMR equivalents with capacity parity as they are significantly cheaper to manufacture, or rather more efficient at packing data. For infrequent access archival type use SMR is far more cost effective.

CZI eredeti hozzászólása:

I was wondering why one of my external drive is getting file corruptions.
It is Seagate 8TB External drive (STGY8000400) which I bought 14 month ago.

I thought I just got bad drive, but it seems I'm getting the SMR issue.
It is used over 50% of capacity already and getting lost folder and files.

You bought a bad drive and expected it to be something it isn't.

https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/internal-hard-drives/cmr-smr-list/

Seagate have a list of their skews outlining SMR or CMR here. Just bear in mind that opting to use a NAS drive for cost savings will come with it's own set of issues without a raid controller handling errors. Expect to pay $300-500 for an actual desktop use drive, with the best option being hunting sales and discounts.

[Illusion of Progress]

Losing data won't be because it is an SMR drive. SMR drives just overlay data where edges overlap a bit, much like shingles on a house, so if you have to write where there is data overlapping it, the other data needs torn up and rewritten, so to speak, which in large enough operations can cause a slowdown as things get backed up. Data loss wouldn't be a cause of it being SMR though.

If you'll be using it as a write once, read many drive, then SMR would be okay (funny enough they'd probably make okay game drives in cases where you don't need an SSD). If you're using it more for scratch operations or writing to it a lot, I'd avoid it though.

[CZI]

ulia eredeti hozzászólása:

https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/internal-hard-drives/cmr-smr-list/

Thank you for the list.
From the list 14TB is in CMR.
So I don't need to return this case.

Basically SMR's advantage is just price.
And the price is not really half of CMR.

Following is price comparison I did about a couple weeks ago.
Per TB is around $20 no matter SMR or CMR.

Seagate TB $/TB
$124.99 6 $20.83 SMR
$193.07 8 $24.13 SMR
$219.99 10 $22.00 CMR
$239.99 12 $20.00 CMR
$269.99 14 $19.29 CMR
$309.99 16 $19.37 CMR
$580.00 18 $32.22 CMR

WD TB $/TB
$89.00 4 $22.25
$119.99 6 $20.00
$179.99 8 $22.50
$239.99 12 $20.00
$274.60 14 $19.61

[ulia]

CZI eredeti hozzászólása:

Basically SMR's advantage is just price.
And the price is not really half of CMR.

Following is price comparison I did about a couple weeks ago.
Per TB is around $20 no matter SMR or CMR.

You will have to explain your comparison here because it doesn't really add up. Seagate's regular Barracuda Compute line is an SMR skew, followed by Ironwolf NAS drives (which should ideally not be used without a raid controller) and the Barracuda Pro that are CMR.

The MSRP for the 8TB variants of these is as follows:
Barracuda (SMR) $135 | $16.875/TB
Ironwolf NAS (CMR) $240 | $30/TB
Barracuda Pro (CMR) $240 | $30/TB

$240 is a big jump from $135. There's a little bit more to it than just strictly comparing SMR to CMR, but the fact of the matter is that SMR exists as a cost saving method as it allows you to pack much more data, and will generally come out at a significantly lower cost.