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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
by 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 agoI 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.