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Why would a WD "BLACK" that is supposed to be high performance ever use SMR? Of course if the product placement of high/low performance makes no sense, how are
by nicolas_t 7y ago
Why would a WD "BLACK" that is supposed to be high performance ever use SMR? Of course if the product placement of high/low performance makes no sense, how are people supposed to know what to buy?
- zlynx 7y agoAs I understand it they've borrowed techniques from SSD firmware. Random writes are written to a linear cache area of the drive and transparently remapped. When the drive gets idle time it will rewrite the SMR zones where those blocks are supposed to go. As a result the write speed of the drive is even faster than a non-SMR drive until the cache area fills up. If your workload does not try to write gigabytes of random junk without giving the drive any idle time, it will work great.
- kasabali 7y ago> As a result the write speed of the drive is even faster than a non-SMR drive until the cache area fills up I'm interested if there's a benchmark showing that?
- NullPrefix 7y agoCould the cache be flash based?
- kasabali 7y agoNo, cache is reserved as a non-SMR area on platters.
- alliao 7y agocan't they employ this technology for CMR drives? in theory the window of time it takes to write will be even smaller...
- Nursie 7y agoWeren't the "Hybrid" drives just that?
- tracker1 7y agoLet's re-encode some video files and see how that works out... edit: or bring down some large CAD files from the server to work on locally... The fact is, it's labelled a performance drive, much like the red drives... SMR should not even be an option here... sure add the extra smart caching/remapping, but you still want performance for larger failes.
- currysausage 7y agoApparently, they don't sell any 2,5″ 7mm CMR drives with 1 TB+. Still weird and misleading that they call it "Black", obviously.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoCurious, is this because they can't physically fit such a large CMR drive in that form factor? What's the actual capacity/size limit?
- kasabali 7y agoThere are 2TB 7mm SMR drives, so ~1.8TB CMR should be easily doable. I think there were 1TB 7mm CMR drives available as far as 5-6 years ago, although I'm not sure about the 7mm part.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoInteresting. Regarding 1.8 TB though, that's a weird size to put on a package, so I can see why they wouldn't do that.
- kasabali 7y agoSorry, I meant up to ~1.8TB. When that's possible 1TB is trival. Regarding your side point, there existed 320GB, 750GB and 1.5TB hard drives, so 1.5TB or even a 1.75TB would not be a weird size for a sku.