3 ms·

It's not like the disk is divided into SMR and non-SMR zones. Adjacent tracks that already contain data must always be re-written. So, these driveswork well if

It's not like the disk is divided into SMR and non-SMR zones. Adjacent tracks that already contain data must always be re-written. So, these driveswork well if managed in one of two ways: * Append-only * Only use every other track If used like that, they can be considered just another hard drive, with an unusually large gap between tracks. But if you try to pack on as much data as the drive will hold, and then modify parts in the middle, the drive is going to have a bad time.

rbanffy 6y ago
That's not what's described in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording
dnr 6y ago
The drive firmware and layout are more sophisticated than you're imagining: All SMR drives have some non-SMR (CMR) zones for buffering and metadata. For the archival drives I was looking at a while ago (host-managed), it was usually 1% or 0.5% of the total. I would imagine these stealth-drive-managed ones have even more, maybe a few percent, to allow more buffering and hide the cost of shuffling data.