The article claims that SMR drives -- Shingled Magnetic Recording -- is slower than normal HDDs. The truth is different. Unless you're unlucky enough to have a

The article claims that SMR drives -- Shingled Magnetic Recording -- is slower than normal HDDs. The truth is different. Unless you're unlucky enough to have a drive without a flash write buffer, SMR drives manage similar read rates to normal disks while having vastly higher write rates. For a while, that is; once the write buffer is full, it'll drop through the floor. SMR is bad for RAID, and it's bad for very high throughput writes, but a well-made disk may actually be faster than the traditional kind for normal users while having higher capacity. See Samsung's archive disks for a nice example. You may now ask yourself what's the point, when flash is even faster. Anyone with enough data that it won't fit on flash should probably use RAID of some kind. And there's something to that... But they won't, and you know it, so they might as well have the capacity.