Seagate Guilty of Undisclosed SMR on Certain Internal Hard

Earlier this week, Western Digital was within the line of fireside when it emerged that a number of of its WD Red household of “NAS-optimized” laborious drives allegedly make use of some type of shingled magnetic recording (SMR), a physical-layer information writing approach that maximizes density at a heavy value of random write efficiency that successfully makes the HDDs unfit to be used in RAID volumes, and in flip most NAS purposes that generally make use of RAID and encourage end-users to construct RAID volumes for information redundancy. A brand new report by Blocks & Files finds that the difficulty is extra widespread than beforehand thought, and that even Seagate employs it with out disclosure on sure fashions.

Several of Seagate’s larger capability Barracuda desktop inside laborious drives use SMR with out disclosing it of their data-sheets. These embrace the eight TB ST8000DM004, and 5 TB ST5000DM000. Both these drives are offered beneath the Barracuda Compute model, which markets “home servers, entry-level DAS, and desktop computers” amongst its use-cases. Seagate does market its Archive and Exos strains of HDDs are using SMR, however point out of the approach is buried of their data-sheets, and never prominently in product advertising and marketing or packaging. Archive and Exos are focused at bulk chilly storage setups the place capability is extra necessary than efficiency. Meanwhile, Toshiba has confirmed that its Desktop HDDs too make use of SMR. The firm’s MQ04 2.5-inch and DT02 3.5-inch HDDs make use of “managed SMR” (i.e. use standard recording and change to SMR because the platters are operating out of house).