[SOLVED] How come no-one ever reviews hdd drives anymore except large capacity

[WINTERLORD]

Iv scoured the Internet for weeks and can't find any useful information on hard drives ranging from 4tb on up to 12tbs

Why does anyone report [on these technologies anymore? For instance while hdd are old news there still useful best I could find on performance was smr vs cmr and that's the Seagate barricuda smr drives are a complete mystery as the Norden ones have mtc multitier caching wich way I understand it is combined nanad ram and hdd space would love to know what a 8tb barricuda performs on smr

Cause I look at the market and Seagate seems to be expinsive for there barricuda drives vs say a western digital blue like 8tb wd blue(and the better cmr cost 119$ yet the so called slower Seagate with inferior tech cost 139 and I can't figure out why this is and there's no reviews that I can find bout latest model smr tech if it's gotten better or how by adding nand to the hdd it performs faster

looking at the specs the Seagate 8tb smr drive is superior to the wd blue 8tb cmr anyone have any idea of the performance difference between these to drives since one has nand optininand and the other has the cmr tech

Anyone know why that is as smr is spose to be the superior tech.

If anyone has a latest model 6or8tb Seagate barracuda modern from like 2020 or 2022 could you share some screen shots? I don't know why is so impossible to find decent hard drive reviews for drives made after 2019 but would make for a good article sense it appears no reputable sites that I'm aware of review anything other than several year old hdd tech.

Now I know things are fixin to change drastically with nand prices but hdd are still very valuable in there own right

 

[USAFRet]

Iv scoured the Internet for weeks and can't find any useful information on hard drives ranging from 4tb on up to 12tbs

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

 

[USAFRet]

Anyone know why that is as smr is spose to be the superior tech.

Where did you read this?
Because that is not necessarily correct.

 

[WINTERLORD]

tech have read that cmr is better on most sites can't think of any one source as iv not read anything good bout smr tech but I do wonder as right now smr barracuda drives cost quite abit more then there cmr counterparts

Iv read the smr info on Ana dtech but it may be outdated as would seem to me Seagate made some new drives with optimized smr drives using danm but find performance specs are bout impossible for me to find on anything newer than 2017 2018

 

[USAFRet]

Oh was a typo I mean cmr is spose to be the superior tech

Simply the way the data is stored and accessed.

CMR is "faster".
SMR can be good for seldom accessed drives and data. Like for a backup drive.

HDD is a mature technology. There isn't a lot of performance difference between brands and models.

Prices cannot be used as a performance indicator.
Retailer A may have a particular drive on sale, at this particular moment.

 

[USAFRet]

What is your actual question and concern?
What might be your use case for these drives?

 

[WINTERLORD]

mostly want to store games and backups, but id be intersted in some performance data i tried to read those backblaze files it loaded one online with ms office and wouldnt read couldnt reead it neatly with openoffice either but from what i did see does give a whole lot of performance details from what i can tell anyways. as for the games i dont play most of um on my hdd drive i swap games in and out of storage onto my main drive as its much faster nvme but can only hold roughly 3games at a time so i put my active games on it whenim done or i get bored or wichever i copy them out for another game yes lot of copying but works for me. now somtimes in rare instances il play from my storage drive but i dont really need to account for the bulk is done backuping and storing large files

specificly i wondered how good are seagate smr drives with the multilevel cached nand and ram they use so those drives have my interest cmr seems like the logical choice aftetr all its cheper than the smr for 6 or 8tb or close enough but i really wonderin whats so good bout the modern smr drives that they can command such a premium over cmr


question number 2 bout smr
also question on SMR it says that once the so say i copy to it a large file im assuming it would always used unused fresh space first? so what if my drive gets full then i delete say 300gb and a day later store somthing there, would this be writing to that space as fresh c;lean unused since it had plenty of time to do background maintence tasks?

 

[USAFRet]

SSDs for your OS, applications, games.

HDD of any type for actual backups and long term storage.

In that use case, "how good" is mostly irrelevant.
Fail rates are within single digit percentages, across brands and models.

Backups in depth, and all is well.

 

[hotaru.hino]

question number 2 bout smr
also question on SMR it says that once the so say i copy to it a large file im assuming it would always used unused fresh space first? so what if my drive gets full then i delete say 300gb and a day later store somthing there, would this be writing to that space as fresh c;lean unused since it had plenty of time to do background maintence tasks?

There's no such thing as "fresh space" in a hard drive. As far as what the state of the platters are concerned, they could literally be anything. The only thing that matters is what the file system thinks is in the hard drive. Because hard drives just need to flip the state of magnetism around, whatever was there previously is irrelevant.

But as far as how file operations go, yes, the file system will usually find the largest contiguous space the file can fit in first, then if it can't, it'll fit chunks of the file in the available spaces. So if you fill up a hard drive and delete data from it, there will be holes and yes, background maintenance will rearrange the data so these holes migrate towards the "end" of the drive.

Although in reality, this concept may only exist in the file system, as hard drives are capable of retrieving data in a way that requires the lowest amount of travel the hard drive head takes. So where the data physically lives and where it lives in the file system may not actually line up.

In any case, this has nothing to do with SMR vs CMR. SMR vs. CMR is how the drive physically manipulates the material on the platter. In CMR (conventional magnetic recording), data is written in a circle of a certain width and each circle of data fits into their own space. In SMR (shingled magnetic recording), the circles of data can partially overlap. The benefit of SMR is data density, but writing performance suffers because the hard drive may have to re-write different circles of data that are close to where the data actually is to make sure that partial overlap doesn't garble up the circle's neighbors.