[PLUG] CMR/PMR hard drive manufacturers and vendors

Ben Koenig techkoenig at gmail.com
Mon Nov 2 17:19:32 UTC 2020


On 11/1/20 6:47 PM, Aaron Burt wrote:
> On 2020-11-01 13:34, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
>> Who makes,  and who sells, reliable "CMR" hard drives
>> with a decent (3 to 5 year) full replacement warranty?
>
> Great topic, inspired some fun reading.  After they were caught 
> selling SMR drives without labeling them as such, WD and Seagate 
> released articles talking about which models are SMR vs. PMR/CMR:
> https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/
> https://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/cmr-smr-list/
>
> I think all of these have 3 year warranties.


Something else worth looking at is HAMR. Seagate was planning to launch 
20TB drives in 2020, but I assume the whole pandemic situation pushed 
back their schedule.


Those were going to be the last CRM/SMR drives. Going forward to 20+ TB 
capacities it looks like the new thing is HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic 
Recording). Not ready yet, but supposedly it's a thing.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15064/seagate-18-tb-hdd-due-in-first-half-2020-20-tb-drive-to-ship-in-late-2020


IMO the SMR idea was a cheap hack to workaround a physics limitation. 
HAMR is supposed to solve the speed problem while increasing capacity 
far beyond CMR/SMR.

-Ben




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