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Given the price premium on these drives in the first place I don't even get why they'd do this? Stick the SMR drives in the EasyStore line or whatever, which is

Given the price premium on these drives in the first place I don't even get why they'd do this? Stick the SMR drives in the EasyStore line or whatever, which is regularly half the $/gb of the bare RED drives. That'd probably also discourage some shucking.

smacktoward 6y ago
In every company, no matter how obscene the margins they're making on a given product, there is someone arguing that those margins could be even larger if they just cut a few corners. Eventually someone listens to that person, and decades of painstakingly built-up brand value gets thrown out the window in order to bring home six nickels tomorrow instead of five.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
cbsmith 6y ago
As mentioned in the Manfred Berger talk, the tech is supposed to, in theory, get you a 25-50% cost effectiveness advantage. Obviously the market prices don't reflect that, but that explains why they'd do this.
- loeg 6y ago
  Reality seems to be more like 10% on a capacity basis. On a performance basis, of course, it's extremely negative.
  - cbsmith 6y ago
    Magnetic disks are generally valued on capacity, but at least as I heard the talk, he was talking about it growing to a 50% difference as they pushed the limits. I get that the reds are more performance oriented, but capacity is still a key factor (if not, you just go SSD and be done with it).
    - loeg 6y ago
      I get that 50% has been the sort of marketing aim for "why bother support SMR at all," but until they actually get there, it's just marketing. Reality is ~10%. Magnetic disks are valued on capacity only because people considered CMR HDDs a performance floor. When they realize how bad SMR is, I think performance becomes a factor. If you're talking about GB per volume, SSDs beat HDDs of all stripes there: the biggest HDDs are 16 TB in a 3.5" form factor, while the biggest SSDs are 100 TB in the same form factor. 10 or 50% improvement in HDDs wouldn't begin to bridge that gap. SMR should be understood to be sort of a fast Tape, rather than slow CMR HDD.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        > SMR should be understood to be sort of a fast Tape, rather than slow CMR HDD. I wouldn't go that far. If I can assume that the firmware won't cause a lot of problems all by itself, I think in my desktop I'd slightly prefer a 7200RPM SMR drive to an equal-price 5400RPM CMR drive. And no matter what kind of hard drive(s) you're using, take a $20 SSD and use half of it as a cache with writeback enabled.
      - cbsmith 6y ago
        > SMR should be understood to be sort of a fast Tape, rather than slow CMR HDD. In fairness, more like an array of tape drives. ;-) I get what you're saying about how it hasn't panned out in reality, but the question was why did they even try SMR, and I expect that was motivated by the misguided potential of the win.
- OriginalPenguin 6y ago
  But perhaps the manufacturing costs do reflect it? In which case the profits would be much, much higher than normal drives.
kasabali 6y ago
They do. Corresponding 2-6TB Blue drives are also SMR and that are shipped inside external drives. Only Reds got the attention because of ZFS issues. I suspect Blue and Red drive have a lot of common in manufacturing they switched all drives in same capacity together.
- andoriyu 6y ago
  Red is getting attention not just because of ZFS, but because Reds are targeted and marketed for workloads that don't work well with SMR. It was well known before that Red are trash compared to Red Pro which IIRC are rebranded HGST DeskStar NAS.

smacktoward 6y ago

In every company, no matter how obscene the margins they're making on a given product, there is someone arguing that those margins could be even larger if they just cut a few corners. Eventually someone listens to that person, and decades of painstakingly built-up brand value gets thrown out the window in order to bring home six nickels tomorrow instead of five.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

cbsmith 6y ago

As mentioned in the Manfred Berger talk, the tech is supposed to, in theory, get you a 25-50% cost effectiveness advantage. Obviously the market prices don't reflect that, but that explains why they'd do this.

loeg 6y ago
Reality seems to be more like 10% on a capacity basis. On a performance basis, of course, it's extremely negative.
- cbsmith 6y ago
  Magnetic disks are generally valued on capacity, but at least as I heard the talk, he was talking about it growing to a 50% difference as they pushed the limits. I get that the reds are more performance oriented, but capacity is still a key factor (if not, you just go SSD and be done with it).
  - loeg 6y ago
    I get that 50% has been the sort of marketing aim for "why bother support SMR at all," but until they actually get there, it's just marketing. Reality is ~10%. Magnetic disks are valued on capacity only because people considered CMR HDDs a performance floor. When they realize how bad SMR is, I think performance becomes a factor. If you're talking about GB per volume, SSDs beat HDDs of all stripes there: the biggest HDDs are 16 TB in a 3.5" form factor, while the biggest SSDs are 100 TB in the same form factor. 10 or 50% improvement in HDDs wouldn't begin to bridge that gap. SMR should be understood to be sort of a fast Tape, rather than slow CMR HDD.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      > SMR should be understood to be sort of a fast Tape, rather than slow CMR HDD. I wouldn't go that far. If I can assume that the firmware won't cause a lot of problems all by itself, I think in my desktop I'd slightly prefer a 7200RPM SMR drive to an equal-price 5400RPM CMR drive. And no matter what kind of hard drive(s) you're using, take a $20 SSD and use half of it as a cache with writeback enabled.
    - cbsmith 6y ago
      > SMR should be understood to be sort of a fast Tape, rather than slow CMR HDD. In fairness, more like an array of tape drives. ;-) I get what you're saying about how it hasn't panned out in reality, but the question was why did they even try SMR, and I expect that was motivated by the misguided potential of the win.
OriginalPenguin 6y ago
But perhaps the manufacturing costs do reflect it? In which case the profits would be much, much higher than normal drives.

kasabali 6y ago

They do. Corresponding 2-6TB Blue drives are also SMR and that are shipped inside external drives. Only Reds got the attention because of ZFS issues. I suspect Blue and Red drive have a lot of common in manufacturing they switched all drives in same capacity together.

andoriyu 6y ago
Red is getting attention not just because of ZFS, but because Reds are targeted and marketed for workloads that don't work well with SMR. It was well known before that Red are trash compared to Red Pro which IIRC are rebranded HGST DeskStar NAS.