Keatah

Ugh, thanks for putting these on my radar. Apparently drive manufacturers are quietly substituting these in their consumer lines.

I was wondering why some 8TB drives jumped down in price. Now I know.

Let me rephrase that, they can ONLY WRITE SEQUENTIALLY. Random writes have to sit in a cache while the HDD clears several adjacent tracks to make room for your incoming data. There is no direct overwriting like in PRML.

That's why they have these big caches. A reasonably accurate way of testing for SMR is to use Crystal Disk info and look to see if it supports TRIM. And the data sheet to see the cache size. 128MB/256MB is a dead giveaway.

For sure. First thing I did about learning about these things was look up the details.

I'm just going to avoid them for now. It seems they're more sensitive to vibration, and I don't trust that they'll have the same lifespan as more traditional drives. Maybe after some more years of other people testing them out for me, I'll take another look.