Smr vs cmr reddit The last time I checked, WD’s 6Tb Red was SMR and I couldn’t find any CMR counterpart! This tweaktown article gives the write speed of the WD Red 4TB CMR EFRX drive as 108. 2TB in Datasheet. A friend of mine told me about CMR vs SMR, so I bought two WD RED + CMR disk in replacement and my NAS become fast. Indeed possibly an SMR drive. ) In addition, you can search for other reports of specific models and whether they're CMR/PMR or SMR. Oct 7, 2023 · Host managed SMR (HM-SMR) is a newer SMR approach that offloads some management functionality to the host OS or device driver. the only reason, that drive managed smr drives are able to exist is, because the average person who buys them has no idea what SMR or CMR is. As are the 20TB HAMR drives also available only to Enterprise users. It should work just as well as CMR for farming once the plots are on the drive (it may possibly take a bit longer to copy to once it starts getting filled, but there shouldn't be a lot of IO involved with copying over the large plot files). Feb 4, 2022 · SMR drives are ok for mass storage workloads - write once, read only afterwards. The "scaldal" was that WD sneaked SMR drives to the Red line without explaining it in the specifications. That can cause some RAID controllers to drop a drive from an array but it won't be because a checksum fails. the problems and controversy came from wd's poor implementation being very unsuited to certain specific workloads and the fact that they hid that they were putting smr drives into their nas lineup where they might see those workloads. Where you start to run into performance troubles with SMR is on sustained writes (say, writing hundreds of gigs at once). WD Blue (CMR ones), WD Red Plus, WD Red Pro, WD Gold, WD Purple, WD Purple Pro are all fine. Amazon sent me a HDWG180 instead. The limit on xboxs are down to the bus and processing itself before harddrives so you can pretty much use anything without an issue. I have not seen any serious suggestions that there is a write limit on HDDs, SMR or CMR, to anywhere the same extent as on SSDs. False advertisement? 2TB: ST2000VX015 SMR. It is crazy. SMRs possibly have an advantage in this, as I believe they might be able to do some form of wear-levelling that's not so practical with SMR. I would avoid anyhow unless you can get a really good deal on them. If you go w/ Seagate, watch out for their 8T externals which are either all SMR or likely to be SMR. I’m fully aware that CMR drives are superior in terms of performance, particularly when rebuilding in a redundant RAID configuration. CMR/PMR. Differences between CMR and SMR HDDs for data preservation. Hi all, I have a number of 10TB WD Red SMR drives, and a few CMR ones. My understanding is that most random reads/writes involve the CPU processing the data, so they should be on an SSD anyway (e. SMR = Shingled Mag Recording New technology (data written same way, but, overlaps like roof shingles. 5" drives and not all that much about SMR vs CMR. I usually look for NAS rated HDDs and found a CMR one on sale on Amazon for 44 USD: "Western Digital 2TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 128 MB Cache, 3. com with the ZFS community as well. Not sure if you understand the terminology difference here but CMR cache zone on a SMR drive is different than the RAM cache on a CMR drive. The SMR drives are the shittiest made by humans. Moreover, WD RED SMR disks are not listed compatibles on Synology website, there is a reason The drive type was labeled “SMR-DM. 5" drive I was consideirng is indeed CMR and my remaining all drives that I have are SMR You might be safe if they're older than around 2020, that's when they started to switch drives over to SMR to save on their costs (which of course never got passed down to the consumer :D) My conclusion was that it was more about marketing shenanigans than actual technological differences between general-use vs surveillance. I've had people tell me to watch out if a drive is a CMR or SMR drive for my NAS/Server. If you use a SMR drive in a RAID array, or to store many small files that are then often randomly updated, then the SMR drive may experience much more wear than a CMR drive would, under the same circumstances. They also relocate data written to the CMR area to the SMR shingles while they're idle, so it is best to use them in bursts of copying a bit less than their CMR area followed by some time to let them recover. The issue is that they had told consumers that it was a 5400 RPM drive, when in fact it's 7200. the difference can be easily bigger than a factor of 5x. Red is a "nas" drive and a nas drive should never be SMR outside of a jbod. in fact the cheapest drives you can get are all CMR: I have 12x SMR and 12x CMR drives available, all 8TB. Steam's update mechanic involved copying and modifying game files (versus just downloading and replacing), which can cause even normal HDDs to struggle. Which of these topologies would make the most sense? 2 pools; 1 pool of SMR only and 1 pool of CMR only 1 pool; 1 vdev of SMR only and 1 vdev of CMR only CMR can of course do it as well but from price perspective if you’re going to use the drive only for media applications and don’t expect fast writes SMR is perfect. Avoid SMR if you can and your budget allows it. No, not anymore. I am wondering if drives in wd my book like WDBWLG0080HBK-EESN are smr or cmr? I am currently on my phone and can't really find any information about these specific drive family. Depending on the application and your patience they MIGHT be acceptable (although unclear why anyone would consider them as the price/TB isn't actually lower usually). I'm going to be using it mainly as a Time Machine backup, a Plex server, and a file hosting site with Nextcloud. Take a look at Google for articles to see why you should use CMR on NAS. 5" D10 GameDrive 12TB is a straight Ultrastar HC520 7200rpm vs the 5400 slowed-down versions in the WD Elements/My Book/EasyStore. I've just bought another one to expand my zfs pool. Because then it has to write much data which potentially fills the cmr "cache" of the smr drive. Thanks, that's very interesting. So if you've got a good deal on an SMR drive and the right use case like storing lots of medium to large files that you intend to write either slowly, or one at a time, SMR is fine. As for noise comparisons between SMR and NAS/ENTERPRISE CMR HDDs: I got here 6TB Barracudas (7200rpm) and 18TB EXOS and the EXOS is less audible for my ears. WD80EFBX-68AZZN0 IS a CMR drive - ALL of the WD Red Pro and WD Red Plus are CMR drives. On my 8T SMR drives, that is ~20GB so I'd guess it is a little less on a 6T drive. I dont know what would be better. For all other technologies: Mixing is fine and SMR is fine, with the understanding that SMR will have worse rewrites and you'll get fewer total IOPS out of an array built with SMRs than you would with CMRs. Or you can buy larger capacity drives (currently over 8TB) which are always CMR (although best to check as this could change). I agree with you that such drives would work with certain applications. SMR vs CMR for NAS - a few scenarios . It's the write operations that are very slow, because an SMR drive must: read 5 full tracks from magnetic platter update changed sectors write 5 full tracks back to magnetic platter 5TB is the largest 2. Even right now, you only save a whopping $1 by going for Red SMR over IronWolf CMR. The WD Reds previously were CMR (which is what you want). Yes, it's bad for gaming. All write/read activities are handled by the drives electronics. IOW, when data is written to LBA 100 on a SSD or SMR drive, it does not actually goto same physical address each time we write to LBA 100 where on a CMR drive LBA 100 is always written to the same place. So I looked it up and it seems the MG09ACA18TE is a CMR drive, which is the better option, I reckon. Unfortunately, there's really no useful information in the revelation that a drive uses TGMR. Is this thinking correct? If so, which should I choose? I know this sub recommends avoiding SMR, but is this sensible for my use case? Why not compare 4TB CMR RED vs 4TB SMR RED that would be a fair comparison. I have now bought the wd40ezaz for 92€, but have now noticed that it is an SMR and people on the internet write all the SMR is only good to store data for an eternity and not to touch. Also, warranty is 5 years, which is fine for me. A lot of (large) sequential writes allows the drive to often rewrite whole shingles. AFAIK 4TB doesn't have a SMR model. All drives use TGMR heads nowadays, including both CMR (i. The post you did link talks about 2. even WD P10 GameDrive 5TB is 5400rpm SMR, while the 3. However this can change at any moment. If you want CMR 5400rpm drives, buy Red Plus. DM-SMR (Drive Managed-SMR) is the most common and are what 99. You may find that an acceptable disparity. Appreciate the article though, and the time put into it. Not all old reds are SMR, but all new ones are which is why they split the red line. CMR cache zone for SMR is usually much larger than the "tiny" 256MB cache that many CMR drives are using. 5" disks are SMR WD: WD Blue 6TB and under, all WD Red are SMR. With only 64MB EZ"R"Z can't be a SMR. When I do, I will not be able to just plop all 6 in and then keep all the info. Posted by u/anxeityismygame - No votes and 1 comment Hello. So using SMR drives in a NAS with multiple disks is probably not a good idea. So far seagate specifically claimed all ironwolf drives are not SMR. Reply reply Avery_Litmus Seagate: Barracuda Compute 8TB and under are SMR, all 2. HM-SMR (Host Managed-SMR) write/read activities are as the name stated, handled by specialized off drive hardware and software. Seagate 10-20TB are CMR. So yes, ANY SMR drive shouldn't be used in ANY RAID configuration. The cost savings of SMR over CMR isn't worth the potential performance issues you may experience. 1. What would be the difference and what option should I go with? The only difference I've seen online is the performance and the way they write the data. 5" vs 3. someone smarter is going to comment after me but the gist of cmr vs smr for nas application has to do with sustained writes and data integrity. It depends on the use case. Had to just replace one after four years because it died. Not an official sub-reddit. TRIM is implemented for a reason into SSD and SMR drives and TRIM also requires ability of a drive to dynamically map LBA to PBA addresses. But what I read about SMR didn't properly prepare me for its abysmal write performance either, and I definitely would never have bought the Archive v2 had I known beforehand. And only have 64mb buffer The WD40EFAX - should be the new version - the SMR version - but have 256 mb buffer. If you don't get a R but a A for a 4TB then it'll be a SMR. Just run Windows defrag manually periodically. To put some numbers on it, the Serve the Home testing of CMR vs SMR shows that a 125GB file transfer finished in just under 15 minutes on a CMR 4TB WD drive but took 24 minutes on an SMR 4TB WD drive. SMR drives may have (such as) 25600MB CMR cache for write buffering, and then flush data into SMR My other NAS has 6 SMR, and I sure as hell am not going to replace all 6 at once. Considering the 3, 4, 6TB CMR models have the same 256MB cache as the SMR models. Red Plus and Red Pro are all CMR. If you want to write constantly, delete, write again, Dec 15, 2022 · Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) drives write data on a hard disk in tracks that do not overlap. in fact CMR drives are cheaper. 5" -WD20EFZX" Not sure which "7200 SMR" you're considering but I'm pretty sure you're reading it wrong. Comparing Seagate ST500LM030, WD10JPVX-08JC3T5, and HGST HTS541010A99E662. g. Hello, I recently bought a TS-251D, and picking a hdd now, the closest to what I want with my budget that's on the ts-251d qnap compatibility site is the WD40EFAX, but with the whole smr vs cmr discussion I ended up forgetting about the qnap hdd compatibility site and bought the WD40EFRX right away. practicalzfs. The new version is cheaper then the old one. Aside from rotation speed difference which I don’t think is that much to be of concern, how bad is it to have different types of disks in the same pool? bs=8M oflag=sync CMR vs SMR bs=16M oflag=sync CMR vs SMR bs=32M (no sync) CMR vs SMR bs=64M (no sync) CMR vs SMR bs=8M oflag=sync for CMR vs bs=16M oflag=sync for SMR bs=32M (no sync) for CRM vs bs=64M (no sync) for SMR Last chart I took the quarter size of cache (8M for CMR, 16M for SMR) oflag=sync flag, divided by the results from full cache When new, SMR drive perform like CMR, but once sectors are filled with data and not zeros, the drive needs an extra step to read sectors before writting to them. WD Red EFRX under 6tb are CMR. Dec 15, 2022 · But beware: A major drawback of SMR found in testing by ServeTheHome is that using a slow SMR drive in a RAID array can put the entire array's data at risk for longer because it takes far longer for the SMR drive to get integrated into the array. It's hard to tell the players without a scorecard, but this is at least a step in the right direction. eg. Before I knew the difference I just bought the cheapest ones at the time, WD100EFAX. Maybe $270 vs $300? I would instantly jump to the $300 CMR. So to answer your original question--it isn't supposed to mean anything, exactly. If you use SMR drives to store infrequently changing data, that is OK. I check them completely before shucking. From now on, whether I'm going to buy a 2. The main question here, if you have a backup or not. This may be an issue for you. there is no cost difference. So since the EFAX was being sold via the same product listing, I ended up paying 10% more for SMR over CMR without realizing it. For the same price, non-smr drives are preferable. The long and the short of it is, if you want SMR, buy Red drives. I'm trying to get three backup HDDs for cold storage under ~$500 but I'm not sure if I should spend more and go all out or if SMR/CMR is even an issue for the scale of what I want to do. My understanding of SnapRAID is SMR shouldn't influence the sync speed as the computer just reads the data off them and not really writing anything on them unless when it comes to interval saves. I have a pool of 4-4TB Seagate Skyhawk HDDs. Above all, you can rely on SMR if you want large hard disks with lower material costs and usually lower electrical power consumption, which serve as pure data storage devices. At the 1-2TB capacity range, SSD's start to make more sense from a cost perspective. Drive-managed SMR (DM-SMR) should simply present an SSD-like interface and beyond the expectation of TRIM commands, shouldn't require particular care from the user. That is the opposite of clear branding. I'm sure there's a Playstation Reddit. There's no point in buying SMR for 8TB drives, just get the cheapest WD and it'll be CMR. Ultrastar HC650 (20TB), HC670 (26TB) are host managed SMR. There are usage patterns that SMR is simply not good for. This friend of mine was helping me pick out parts and when it came to the hard drive he kept brushing off what I was saying and picking out hard drives that were smr saying it didn't matter and that his friend has the same one with no issues. SMR has less chances of recovering the data because of the way SMR drives write it. Seagate 10, 12, 14TB can contain CMR drives, as far as I know all 16TB do and WD ship CMR drives in their external drives 8TB or larger. Red line are "NAS" rated drives designed to work with multiple disks together in a NAS RAID. This improves performance no end but this is not what you will find in consumer systems. So I have three 6TB reds. SMR drives as data disks will simply write slower to the data disk. My homelab virtualization server was easy. ST2000VX008 CMR. (For example, WD's list doesn't include external drives. I ordered an "old version" one from amazon, as I believed it should be HDWN180 too. Seagate will tell you what drives are SMR here A full list of SMR vs CMR can be found here. 5 or 3. 4 or 5 years ago… I thought it wasn’t serious so I bought some cheap SMR drives to use, but the initial expansion was too slow. The hard drive is starting to fill up though so I am looking at expanding but I'm not sure if CMR vs SMR matters for what I am doing. When resilvering, SMR drives are slow and the process can completely fail because the rebuild time is too long. I didn’t realize until now that 2 of the drives are ST4000VX007 (CMR) @ 5,425 RPM and the other 2 are ST4000VX013 (SMR) @ 5,980 RPM. I'm pretty overwhelmed with the whole SMR vs CMR thing. 4TB in Datasheet SMR allows for more tracks per platter whilst using larger write heads by overlapping the tracks, this results in a slow write speed for SMR drives. Hello u/qwe304!Thank you for posting in r/DataHoarder. So SMR IS a type of PMR. . Photo archive is mostly accessed sequentially with large blocks, so smr drives may be used. However, let’s say I have a CMR drive as it’s own pool and a SMR drive as it’s own separate pool as well. When I couldn't reach the data in it, I understood that the 6 tb seagate disk I had before had SMR technology. A hub for all Seagate Drive related queries, this is a community run sub-reddit. I think you misread that article. if you look up the specs on their website they will list cmr vs smr. 5 hours with a CMR and 9. There also is Host Managed SMR, where all the SMR operations are performed by the host OS itself. Please remember to read our Rules and Wiki. I have had to resort to a lengthy table of drives by model number to find out whether a WD, or other for that matter, is CMR or SMR. I looked at the western digital listing again, and it explicitly says the drive time is CMR. the 14TB) with small enough tracks that doesn't need to use it. launching programs, playing games, using a web browser which relies on database files). 5 DAYS!!! with a SMR. Got it about a month ago. Not sure if the website is scamming me by Selling the SMR or not. SMR vs CMR is of most concern if you’re using them in a RAID array. Coming to my question, how can I find out whether the 2. The issue with SMR in RAID is exactly what you're experiencing and how the submarining of SMR is NAS drives brought the issues to light. Running Windows Defrag will actually TRIM the SMR disk first before it defragments it, and should keep it in good shape. I am looking at 1tb drives or bigger is fine. 9% of drives that home consumers will buy. Jan 5, 2025 · Exploring reliable 2. I have not opened them yet as I just received 2 new 8tb WD My Books lastnight from the recent $99/8TB Sale, but the speed that its doing the preclear seems drastically slower than the 8TB enclosed drives i got earlier in the year. Although WD Red SMR drives work fine for most RAID configs, they just are not optimal for ZFS. I never had a problem identifying Seagate drives as CMR or SMR using their spec sheets. in this case we have an issue, because as you probably know the data on new 6 or 8 TB cmr drives is very little, because backblaze is going for the best density, that is cheap enough. CMR: Reliability. Disclaimer: Sorry to spam just want to make sure people have easy answer. Do NOT use SMR drives in a NAS. With CMR/PMR, there's no overlapping of the rings, with SMR there is, meaning data that gets rewritten requires a lot of other data to be shifted and also rewritten where a normal drive wouldn't need to. 16TB X16 ST16000NM001G - SMR or CMR? 16TB X18 Seagate Skyhawk 4TB, 5900RPM, 64MB cache, CMR, 3 years warranty ( ST4000VX007 ) Western Digital Blue 4TB, 5400RPM, 256MB cache, SMR, 2 years warranty ( WD40EZAZ) So Skyhawk is a surveillance disk but it seems like it has better specs (especially being CMR). 5" drives are SMR (well except for the tiny capacities under 1TB) Are any of the disadvantages of SMR present in those TDMR/CMR-drives too? From what I read, it shouldn't be, it should actually be just as fast as any CMR in every situation. additional writes are now really slow and make the host think the drive is broken. I searched some of the “CMR vs. My old ones are CMR, new one is SMR. Looking at these 2 drives, the 2 TB Barracuda is only a couple bucks more than the 1 TB, but this is presumably because the 2 TB model uses SMR, based on the price as well as the larger cache (256 vs 64 MB). It works fine in most applications, so you wouldn't even notice it, but it does come with one flaw: Sustained write performance is severely impaired. These are CMR, no doubt. SMR is best for write once (or very rarely) and read many type stuff. If you get SMR get a host managed SMR and let your system decide which region to write to, performance is still bad but at least it’s better than the device managed SMR. This design allows for easy read/write operations as each track can be accessed independently. You don’t what to use SMR in RAID. If you’re using it as a working directory (ie, actively editing files on it) then it may be more of a The problem with SMR drives start when it comes to resilver / rebuild the array. A CMR would most likely be even better. there are MASSIVE differences in reliability between drives. While faster CMR HDDs like the EXOS are around constant 280 MB/s in read/writes and ~65% as fast as (fast) SSD's. I doubt it does if you've got the right adapters or whatever. i wont comment on the second, but i will tell u no matter what kind of setup u have, if u are writing large amounts of data to the disk continuously, smr sees a serious dropoff in performance bc the drive simply cannot handle long sustained writes. The biggest red SMR drives are 6 Tb. there is no price difference and if you are actually looking for best dollar/TB drives, then you get 12-14 TB wd externals, which are all CMR drives and you buy those on sale. 757K subscribers in the DataHoarder community. That was back when WD wasn't disclosing SMR vs CMR and got sued over it. 2TB CMR has 64MB cache compared with 256MB for the SMR models. It sounds like CMR is all around better in every way other than price where it costs more, but I'm not sure if it's worth the extra money where I won't be writing a lot I'll mostly just be reading after writing a More concretely, each vendor has varyingly-complete enumerations of SMR versus CMR drives. ST4000VX007 CMR. But if you ever need to get a new drive, pay attention to SMR vs CMR and only pick up an SMR drive, if the price is right. So you have very short time window to recover deleted data before it is cleaned up by the drive. I need more storage for games, but can't decide between a NAS drive that uses CMR (Seagate Ironwolf ST4000VN008) or a desktop drive that uses SMR (Seagate Barracuda ST4000DM004). It might happen, but i doubt that they'll try to repeat what WD did now that it is pretty well known how well SMR works in arrays. This differs from device managed SMR (DM-SMR) where the SSD controller alone handles optimization in a black box manner. As for the SMR, it is the BarraCuda series (though the BarraCuda Pro series is CMR). In general you’ll have slower random write speeds. My photos performance went from painful to pleasant. I’m running it in SHR, and it does seem to take longer to run SMART tests on the SMR drive rather than the CMR one There a lot debate about SMR vs CMR - that I dont understand. Should I go hassle WD about this and see if they’ll replace. IMO, I'd go with a 3. I also found 2 surveillance dives that are CMR but they are surveillance drives and I have no experience or knowledge about them. 5" drives are SMR. ” I also ran HDAT on an old 1TB WD Caviar Black I have and it shows as SATA, not SMR-DM. Also Avoid any Harddrive that has SMR or Helium filling: I'm glad I'm not the only one who goes out if their way to find CMR. The sustained write speed of SMR is highly dependent on the sequential/fragmented nature of the write load; for sequential writes the performance will be the same as a non-SMR drive. I forget to state that my parity drives are all CMR, only the disk drives are a mix of CMR and SMR. Last few days i've been trying to decide between ST1000DM010(pmr) and ST2000DM008(smr), and every forum i've visited one guy says that smr drives are completely fine as game drive then the next thread i visit someone says the opposite, so i've been looking on amazon and their reviews seem about the same, Thanks. SMR shouldn't be failing checksums just because it's SMR. Interestingly - it seems that the 3. For media, it's just going to take longer to write to the disk, playback (read speed) is unaffected. 8tb and up is SMR. Oh, no, even better I just realized - they DON'T say it isn't SMR!!!! They say it's CMR, Conventional Magnetic Recording. Like for archives, backups, user media storage. But the CMR / SMR list on Seagate's website still states all skyhawk drives are CMR. All 2. I just swapped out my SMR 6TB WD60EFAX (5400rpm SMR) drives for 10TB WD101EFBX (7200rpm CMR) drives. 5 inch disk, I will always prefer CMR. I care about total disk usable, don't really care about throughput as it'll all be over 1Gbps ethernet. Almost all of the SMR drives you will get will be Drive Managed, doing SMR whilst pretending to be any normal drive that the OS would expect to see. This subreddit has gone Restricted and reference-only as part of a mass protest against Reddit's recent API changes, which break third-party apps and moderation tools. It is also specifically mentioned as CMR in datasheets, which you can download on their site again, if drive managed SMR costs half of what CMR costs, then you can make a case for it, but as it stands now, there is no case. While SMR can be fine in some use cases, it just isn't worth it. More cache isn't a bad thing, but why is it needed for a CMR disk at all? I guess if they continue to support TRIM we'll know. userbenchmark also don't have the higher 4k IOPS Write that are indicative of the CMR cache on DM-SMR drives. Went to Seagate website to check SKU and found out there are 2 SKUs for both 2TB and 4TB models, one SMR and one CMR. DIY networking, Raspberry Pi, computer, PBX, VOIP. As mentioned above, the price of the SMR is cheaper as compared to the CMR. There are SMR and CMR variants of WD Purple 2TB and 4TB drives. write very few times and read a lot of times. It was a fresh drive… on Synology back when the whole SMR vs CMR controversy first came to light. (That could ofc be biased by me and which drives i bought and checked) But yes. Read operations from SMR function just like normal CMR drives. SMR Drives: WD Reds are all SMR. Right now 8 Tb red drives are all CMR. In CMR drives, each data track is laid out next to the other without overlapping. WD had taken flak because they had sold WD Red drives that were SMR instead of CMR, which caused ALL KINDS of RAID issues. 10TB+ used to always be helium-filled CMR drives – whether Barracuda, Ironwolf or Exos – but looking at your drive’s housing, it looks like a regular air-filled drive (it even has a breathing hole). It is strongly recommended not to use SMR based drives in RAID / ZFS arrays. While a majority of your activity will be reads, game updates will wreak havoc. If you already use SMR drives in your RAID array, and you don't have any problems with the day-to-day speed just keep using them. the upside is you can stuff more data onto a platter. It is the perfect use case for a SMR drive. Puzzling. ) SMR still uses magnetism. Or it has the same number of platters with less density, meaning there would still be no need to use SMR to squeeze in more density per platter as they already have a higher capacity model (i. The only CMR drives in that budget is Seagate Skyhawk surveillance drives. You can likely write over a given area of the drive at least a thousand times. But if you don't use them for constant random writing, then they are perfectly fine. Hi all, I can see that CMR is the overall winner in To my knowledge Seagate was not the one who hid that in their spec sheet. Of course, people can reach wrong conclusions if they don't know what they're doing I stay away from SMR drives entirely as you can usually find CMR drives on sale for the same price. This SMR, cmr, PMR stuff is quite confusing. SMR drives slow down as the fill up, and you can't use them in a NAS with RAID. Problem: Just saying "it's a PMR drive" doesn't tell you if it's SMR. The only negative comment I was able to find with a quick CTRL+F search that does mention SMR was one from u/avonschm. And I certainly want to know, if a drive is SMR or CMR, so I can make an informed decision. That is the problem. The rest like IronWolf, Firecuda etc are CMR but more For light, non-RAID desktop use, an SMR drive is… fine. All right, as you've seen in a couple of other posts, I'm a noob when it comes to NAS stuff, TrueNAS, and the like. I cannot tell or find good info if external drives are smr or cmr or if I should really care. CMR hard drives, on the other hand, have a higher risk of accidental damage to the disk due to its magnetic head hitting the edge of the disk. If you want to write constantly, delete, write again, overwrite, then SMR drives are not suitable. If you want 7200rpm CMR, buy Red Pro. All WD RED PRO are SMR. 4TB: ST4000VX013 SMR. Pulling the info from the last two article together that would mean that the speed of the WD Red 4TB SMR drive during a rebuild would be about 37% of the speed of the CMR drive. By now there's so much SMR all around us that SMR is the I've had people tell me to watch out if a drive is a CMR or SMR drive for my NAS/Server. The price of both is simmilar ($150 vs $125 CAD). Simple RAID is not a backup and there are real chances to lose all data with both cmr and smr drives. They just released it seems and I can't really find anything but one japanese report with an obstructed picture about them. I just ordered two new CMR drives WD101EFBX. They don't write new data on top of the old data, they write it in the free space and schedule a cleanup job to clean the place where the data was stored previously. e. This is a sub that aims at bringing data hoarders together to share their passion with like minded… we couldn't be bothered to do more than some copy/paste and by mistake copy/pasted the CMR from the other model it isn't technically SMR because reasons. SMR is fine for write once read often. WD at one point secretly changed them to SMR, and then introduced the old CMR drives as Red Plus. Specifically for Seagate, some of the CMR drives are the IronWolf (and IronWolf Pro) and the SkyHawk (and SkyHawk AI) series. It may not be. At the time, a 6TB Ironwolf was 10% less, but I decided to replace with the same model drive. Is it best to use the CMR drives as my twin parity drives, and move the EFAX SMR drives from parity to data drives? I'd agree heavily with this. Both WD and Seagate vary CMR and SMR depending on the drive by single characters in the model number. The SMR drives will be doing nothing but reading, and as long as they haven't done any significant write activity in the recent past their read speeds should be similar to CMR If you will never do that and just need individual disks with no scaling plans for the future, SMR will be fine. non-SMR--what people are calling PMR in this thread) and SMR drives. You do NOT want to use SMR drives for your parity disk. For your "dumping" scenarios you'd see a tiny difference between SMR and non-SMR drives. 93 subscribers in the DIY_Geeks community. SMR is a technique used to make drives with higher capacity. Please note that your post will be removed if you just post a box/speed/server post. In my experience, WD SMR is implemented much better than Seagate. 5" drive and all >1TB 2. For occasional backups and cold storage, SMR is perfectly fine. The WD40EFRX - should be the old version - the CMR version. If you download a lot of stuff regularly, writing can and will get VERY slow on a SMR drive, while CMR will maintain performance (it'll drop off a little but not as dramatically as on SMR drive) Also, part of the issue is that the price difference between a CMR and SMR disk usually aren't that significant to justify the SMR purchase. Both technologies (SMR and CMR) have their justification and their respective fields of application. So my opinion, if it's a significant cost advantage to get SMR for dumping files to it occasionally, SMR is fine. " SMR vs. Everything is 5400rpm and understandibly SMR. Comment by darkfiberiru: Yes sorry I swapped smr and cmr I apolgize. The few entries on hdd. Desktop, Eco, Green I accidentally bought a WD30EFAX instead of a WD30EFRX (CMR vs SMR), by clicking "buy again" on amazon, and I'm using the disk, which options do I have now? Ok, in the last few days one of my 2-bay ds218 hdd went in a "failing" state, so I clicked "buy again" on my 3 years old order in my amazon account without worrying to much. And Blue is a normal consumer grade disk but with a worse recording technology (SMR). For immediate help and problem solving, please join us at https://discourse. If you just plan to fill it once and then read data and write very infrequently, it’s not a big deal. Since I can't seem to crosspost, if anyone is interested, here are the results from my extensive testing with SMR disks vs CMR disks in various RAID configurations testing for RAID array rebuild times, file transfer performance in a couple different scenarios, and effects TRIM has on the performance. for drive managed SMR drives. WD does not make any drives 8TB and larger that are SMR. Someone needs to be help accountable for this. I’d say - doesn’t matter. I replaced all the SMR drives with CMR and moved the SMR’s to unRAID Which seems to handle the drives OK. And sometimes they hang at 100% active time for hours, without any reads/writes. CMR vs SMR mostly matters for when you plant to re-write data. It will have to be one at a time, and that will be SMR with CMR mixture as we start replacing HDD. Jul 30, 2020 · All the Seagate Barracudas except 1tb version, are SMR drives. Yet, I cannot explain my drop in sync speed. I understand SMR basically affects write speed, more when the drive is very full because of overlapping platters and rewrites to store more data. If you go the Seagate route, I think getting 14T and bigger rewards you w/ an Exos drive inside. They’re not ideal for NAS systems though as many people use their NAS as a backup or file server. Ultrastar HC530 - final classic CMR drive vs HC550 experimental EAMR technology Question/Advice Hello, I can get the HC520 12tb which is the rebranded Gold (probably safest one of them), at the same price as the 14tb HC530 (the last traditional hdd from my understanding), even if it's labeled PMR which means perpendicular, another term for CMR. Add the required hardware, drop in some nvme's and away we go. SMR” sites and confirmed this should be CMR. May 28, 2020 · If you scour Amazon for WD Red’s, you will rarely, if ever, see whether the drive is CMR or SMR. So I guess, TLDR, if you have to buy SMR, get at least WD. 5 MB/s. But for WD 8-20TB are all CMR. But for now, suppose we find a 16TB SMR on the market, it won't be a lot cheaper than a 16TB CMR. Their testing also showed a RAID rebuild time of 14. they just shouldn't exist PERIOD. If the 20TB WD conventional Enterprise drives come to the consumer market, they're SMR. Aha! CMR now means "PMR that is not shingled. 5 inch 2 tb Backup plus I bought at the same time as the 6 tb desktop disk is smr or This article explains WD's branding change. On the other hand, SMR vs CMR does make a huge difference, so do check that out regardless of which model is chosen. Highly recommend asking for recommendations on a console gaming forum. All that said, if given the chance I'd take a CMR over SMR any day. View community ranking In the Top 1% of largest communities on Reddit. I had no idea about SMR vs. Purple line are "Surveillance" disks and contain an extra ATA command that if your NVR supports it, it can make use of it. 5 HDD models for long-term archiving. CMR is definitely better, but SMR is fine. If you’re using the disk for archival then this won’t be much of a concern. For everything else except sometimes price, CMR is better. And that damn thing is SMR. Should I avoid SMR in a 4 bay setup? Hello All, I am reaching out to see if it is possible to tell within unraid if an enclosed drive is CMR vs SMR. I finally found some CMR But one is a Desktop HDD the WD10EZEX CMR and another one is the wd10ezex-00wn4a0 SMR. But the reality is, SMR is not significantly larger than CMR, and not significantly cheaper. And the 8TB has always been CMR with 128MB cache. All 8TB+ WD and 10TB+ Seagate drives are CMR. Comment by darkfiberiru: That's correct WD Red EFRX under 6tb are CMR. What are CMR and SMR Drives? CMR Drives: CMR, or Conventional Magnetic Recording, is the traditional method of storing data on hard drives. Consumer SMR is device managed SMR which lies to your system that it’s CMR hence why we see those shameful speeds of 30mb/s. WD changing a well known and reliably good performing NAS hard drive for one that is just "adequate" without publishing it to their customers is still not acceptable. Every thread I've come across on SMR vs CMR drives say SMR is garbage. Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) allows tracks to overlap, which results in higher data densities, but slower read and write times compared to CMR drives. If you are looking at two drives that are equal and the only difference is CMR vs SMR, CMR in a heartbeat. I've got 3x6TB and 3x4TB WD Reds that are mostly SMR (1 is CMR) sitting here waiting for me to build my SCALE setup. Honestly standard reds should be called something else. TL;DR: CMR vs. SMR drives should read as fast as a CMR and writing should be like a CMR till they are overwhelmed, at which point their buffers are full and they start doing all the SMR business to sort it out, this will be where the performance will be affected but it will be normal once it sorts itself out. after the "cache" is filled the drive needs time to move data from cmr to the smr part - and thats where the problem starts. Don't know about Toshiba. I was going to get Seagate exo x18s (14tb) but they are CMR drives. SMR drives are fine for data drives in the array. In theory - though I haven't tested it - resilvering a CMR drive into an array of SMR drives shouldn't be any slower than resilvering a CMR drive into an all CMR array. And that means that sequential writes are both fast and efficient. Was there ever any fall out from the SMR to CMR debacle? I'd love to get my money back on that mistake. Now I have 4 cameras recording 24/7 on it and it is always fast, the web UI responsive, so don't install SMR on it. Currently looking to upgrade from the current "setup" of 20 something 4-1,000 GB flashdrives/SD cards that currently hold everything I have. There is some old reddit posts with different drive numbers. Fragmentation with a lot of write/delete/write operations can also cause significant slowdown. Where SMR fails on it’s face is writing, any mechanical drive sucks for random writing but SMR sucks as much as a floppy drive. SMR does matter. 5" 8TB WD or 10TB Seagate to get a CMR drive at a lower per TB price than a portable. If they are smr, what are you buying these days? For photo storing, they are the same. They will, though, block writes once the PMR cache area is full until it can flush it to the main SMR area. Solution: "CMR" inserts the word CONVENTIONAL Magnetic Recording. SMR drives good as for archiving, i. SMR drives are more reliable than CMR drives as they store information in overlapping tracks, reducing the likelihood of data reading or writing errors. Note that there's a chance you order a EZRZ and get a completely different drive. The rebuild took significantly less time with both WD101EFBX. Think about the second storage or use cloud for additional protection. All WD Red Pro are SMR. But perhaps more expensive, especially if the SMR drive already is in use. Since I edit clips and also play now and then on the hdd games is then a SMR pretty bad for me? To put some numbers on it, the Serve the Home testing of CMR vs SMR shows that a 125GB file transfer finished in just under 15 minutes on a CMR 4TB WD drive but took 24 minutes on an SMR 4TB WD drive. qynsx elftq kldj olel iiufdw rigy igejnlgz tkyp rnnee wfuw