Are they gonna fail quickier in comparsion to CMR drives?
I ask because i like SMR for their coldness, silence, low wattage and fast (enough) reading.
1 Like
I would not touch SMR with a footpole for usage in a NAS due to the shingled layout of the data on disk. But for Chia farming they are OK you will only write once and read for the rest of the disk life. However I am not so sure about their resale value due to their bad performance in real word usage. Now most High capacity enterprise drives are CMR, so if you find an enterprise drive that is SMR then you can consider it for Chia farming. Now disk innovation is not standing still and WD is betting on UltraSMR (How UltraSMR Makes the Industry’s Highest Capacity Drives) to make up for SMR’s initial flaws.
1 Like
I also think they are neat for those reasons, and if I were to time travel to 2021, I absolutely would have filled a JBOD with 8TB Baracuda drives. These have a cloud hanging over their heads though, these drives are the cheapest new, have the lowest warranty periods, and were a little sketchy in the promotional material from vendors (manufacturers not 100% disclosing a drive was SMR when people assumed they were CMR in some cases). So yes, I give them a thumbs up, they had a purpose.
But today? With everyone gearing up for larger farms, energy prices going up (I’m up an extra $0.04 /kWh, I can only imagine the rest of Europe right now)… I’d probably just start with 14TB SAS drives for the density to build out a farm right now.
Well, maybe size matters too. 50TiBs is an easy target with SMR drives… some basic CPU compressed plots… you can still make a good case for them.
2 Likes
aim for highest density, and lowest price. we had recently HDD day…20TB drives at 14 CHF/TB. SAS use more power, hotter than tourist SATA.
2 Likes
I was in the market for another drive, and I noticed the 8TB model of Western Digital Blue happens to be CMR instead of SMR at about the same price point. Honestly, they probably don’t last any longer than SMR since these are marketed the same (light duty consumer drive), but I’m game for an experiment. I will report back if it delivers or falls flat on its face.
2 Likes
SMR, CMR…drives are mechanically same. I doubt there will be any lifetime advantages except more capacity, and slight annoyance on OS level.
1 Like
SMR for Chia usage (or other proof of space coins like Burst or whatever they’re called now) are fine.
They’re horrible for general usage, but we’re in one of their “sweet spots” where they work well.
BTW - it was the Seagate Archive that was SMR, not the Barracuda, CaptainP_Plots-a-lot.
1 Like