Question WD Blue 2TB CMR vs SMR

johnr283

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Aug 5, 2013
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I'm looking at 2 WB Blue HDDs to go in my old PS2
2TB , 64MB , 5400 RPM , CMR WD20EARZ
2TB , 256MB , 7200 RPM , SMR WD20EZBX

I know SMR is not as good as good. Does the higher cache size and disk speed make up for this?
 

Satan-IR

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Not a matter of how much cache you have. SMR are good for storage archiving. When you write once to disk and there's not many read/write which is what heppens for a day to day PC/system/console. The SMR drives have slow read/write speeds compared to CMR which won't cause much trouble for running PS2 games I guess. Bandwidth would be enough but I won't use a SMR drive for this purpose.

Does the PS2 drive bay support/accep SATA drives? I think back in the day the Sony HDD and network support to fat PS2s they used IDE hard disks on the console. You might need an aftermarket adapter of some sort I reckon. You might already have this I guess?

TL;DR: I'd get the CMR drive.
 

johnr283

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Aug 5, 2013
172
6
18,615
Not a matter of how much cache you have. SMR are good for storage archiving. When you write once to disk and there's not many read/write which is what heppens for a day to day PC/system/console. The SMR drives have slow read/write speeds compared to CMR which won't cause much trouble for running PS2 games I guess. Bandwidth would be enough but I won't use a SMR drive for this purpose.

Does the PS2 drive bay support/accep SATA drives? I think back in the day the Sony HDD and network support to fat PS2s they used IDE hard disks on the console. You might need an aftermarket adapter of some sort I reckon. You might already have this I guess?

TL;DR: I'd get the CMR drive.
Thanks. I'll get the CMR Drive . I see that Amazon only carries them from sellers and BestBuy doesn't carry them either. I'll just buy them strait from Western Digital.
 
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