Do You Have an SMR Hard Drive? This is the List of Models that Use it

May 10, 2020 Matt Mills Hardware 0

In recent times, the news has come to light that many manufacturers, including WD, Toshiba and Seagate, sell hard drives with SMR technology without having notified users about it. This technology allows to have a greater capacity in the disk saving costs but it has negative implications for the user. If you want to know if you have an SMR hard drive , in this article we are going to give you the complete list of models that use it, and what its implications are .

Selling hard drives with SMR technology is normal. For the manufacturer it means being able to save costs in the manufacture of the hard disk since SMR technology allows them to increase the density of the platters, or in other words increase the capacity of the hard drives without having to physically modify them. However, using this technology has some disadvantages for users, and the fact that manufacturers have not previously warned about it is, at least, a rather serious situation.

What does it mean that your hard drive is SMR?

SMR technology is based on the fact that it superimposes layers of writing on the plates of the hard disk. So that we understand each other, if normally the tracks are written to the hard disk one after the other leaving a small space in between, with SMR some layers overlap, which saves a lot of space and thus offer greater capacities on the disk Lasted.

The use of this technology has several implications for users:

Lower performance : There is a marked decrease in performance if the hard disk is SMR. For example, in the WD models the speed drops from 210 MB / s to 150 MB / s, and this in theoretical data because then the real ones are even lower.
RAID problems : Another problem that the tracks overlap is that it gives problems in RAID environments, and more specifically when reconstructing a RAID, as data parity errors are obtained and the operation is not completed, causing a potential data loss.

As published by WD at the time, its WD Red hard drives are designed for home users and SMBs, especially for NAS with 1 to 8 bays, and are prepared for workloads of up to 180 TB per year. Because of how SMR technology works, by means of data being written to free sectors of the disk to later reorganize with DMSMR, the disk needs to “rest” for this to happen and to be able to reorganize the data automatically, which means that they are not prepared for high workloads.

List of hard drives using SMR technology

There is a way to tell if the hard drive is SMR if you have it on a NAS or have the ability to access a UNIX command console. Simply enter the following command:

hdparm -I / dev / sda | grep TRIM

Where sda is where you have the disk mounted (can be sdb, sdc, etc.). SMR hard drives have TRIM support, so if it is listed it is SMR. If it is not listed, it is probably CMR and you do not have any problem.

Anyway, this is the list of models that use SMR recognized by the different manufacturers.

Toshiba: