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  • StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    Pass... It's a Seagate.

    Would be nice to get more mechanical disk benchmarks happening though, especially some of the larger 8-10TB+ drives.
  • MrSpadge - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    Yeah, I've also seen at least one Seagate drive die. Never ever should anyone buy them again!
  • 29a - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    If you're in it long enough you'll see all brands die.
  • Death666Angel - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    I think MS was being sarcastic by indulging in SLs nonsense comment.
  • StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    Not a nonsense comment.
    Nor did I mention anything about reliability... That was just an assumption by MrSpadge.
  • Oliseo - Sunday, June 23, 2019 - link

    Here's the thing, the English language is such that you don't have to literally mention reliability for everyone to know that's exactly what you were talking about.

    Or are you now claiming everyone else was wrong to infer what you implied? In which case, the onus is on you to be more explicit in future to what you're actually talking about.
  • StevoLincolnite - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link

    Rubbish Oliseo.

    Then again, if people automatically assumed I was talking about the drives reliability, maybe that just says everything about Seagates track record?

    I was actually talking about warranty, or lack there-of here... I don't want to have to send anything overseas for replacement/repair.
  • eek2121 - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    I have some hard drives that would like to disagree with you. Including a 10 MB one. MB. Not GB.
  • Henry 3 Dogg - Sunday, January 30, 2022 - link

    unless you made it yourself, I've seen a drive of that brand die
  • eek2121 - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    I had the 5 GB drive die after 3 months of use. No more seagate for me. Loved the form factor though. These drives are small.
  • abufrejoval - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link

    You seem to love holding on to your grudges. 5GB, that was a while ago. I used real SCSI back then.
  • MDD1963 - Thursday, June 20, 2019 - link

    5 GB? 1998 or so?
  • oliwek - Thursday, July 4, 2019 - link

    Or is it that his '10MB. Not GB' is in fact 10GB ? So the guy speaks about the 5TB drive from the article when he mentions 'having the 5GB' ? LOL
  • Henry 3 Dogg - Sunday, January 30, 2022 - link

    Every WD drive I've ever owned has died.

    My experiences with Seagate drives have been much better.
  • PeachNCream - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    Pass because of the 3.0 micro-B connector. Those cables seem to fail an awful lot.
  • Alistair - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    ugh, can't believe it is micro, PASS!
  • moozooh - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link

    Idk what you guys are doing with your USB cables, but I haven't even managed to kill the connectors in my phone and tablet that I've been using every day (often putting them on the cable several times a day, in fact) for the past five years or so. And these are supposed to be backup drives—you don't have to disconnect them at all (and if you do, just pull the computer-side USB plug and don't touch the micro side). The Micro-B isn't great, but it's not THAT bad.
  • Oliseo - Sunday, June 23, 2019 - link

    This is the Internet, where sensationalism rules supreme. As soon as people say "seem", you know they're using Weasel words to disguise their own ignorance.
  • badbanana - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link

    +1
  • Samus - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link

    I've noticed that, too. A lot of the time I have trouble getting drives to connect - swapping in a different cable solves it.

    Amazing how some fragile crap like that got standardized, like the bulk of 80-pin PATA cables back in the day that couldn't communicate at ATA133 without corrupting drives, and initial SATA cable connectors that cracks on motherboards.
  • Oliseo - Sunday, June 23, 2019 - link

    If swapping a cable solves your issue, then it's the cable and not the connector. Otherwise a new cable wouldn't resolve the problem.

    My money would be that your bending the cables too much, and this stress is fracturing the core.
  • abufrejoval - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link

    I find it hard to trust any drive with really valuable data. And it gets worse as capacity increases.

    So when I had to upgrade and expand a RAID6 of 8x2TB 3.5" drives I could have gone with fewer drives at higher capacity, but RAID6 becomes really unattracive at lower disk counts, RAID1 wasn't really ideal without a hot spare and sticking with older low capacity drives didn't seem really attractive either.

    So I took a chance and switched to 2.5", which had the exact same €/TB cost as 3.5" drives, but retained a high spindle count for throughput at much lower power and I was glad the old 2.5" price premium is finally gone.

    Only Segate had them at 4TB and with RAID support, which gave me the extra capacity at a tolerable price. Not sure I'd want to suffer a RAID6 rebuild on 8x 14TB drives: It already takes three days at 4TB.

    I used to operate another RAID with WD notebook HDDs, but without TLER I had too many unnecessary rebuilds and abandoned "extra low power RAID" for a while.

    I'd have taken a WD, because they are my favorite brand for the last decade, but they don't offer a product in that "above notebook" NAS range below SAS drives. So I deliberated, compared technical data sheets, researched Seagates recent quality history a bit and risked a dive.

    Six months 24x7 no issues so far, confidence is rising. The backup system runs a mix of WD-Green and Red but also Seagate "video surveillance" drives (all 3.5") since at least 5 years, again, no issues, but not 24x7.

    I don't think there are significant constant quality defects in any surviving HDD manufacturer, when it comes to a conservative middle spot of the drives themselves. At the very leading capacity or technology edge, they sell to the hyperscalers on unforgiving contracts so by the time the product reaches mass market, they know what they do and what they cannot afford.

    They might cut corners in an external chassis, customers might also forget these chassis contain delicate mechanics that are susceptible to heat, humidity and power variations, but the core hard drive is a known quantity.

    Which is why these drives should never contain the only copy of anything you consider valuable.
  • abufrejoval - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link

    Just to be clear: Those 4TB drives in the RAID6 are absolutely not SMR...
  • azfacea - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    Imagine buying hard drive in 2k19 LUL
  • neblogai - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    I can easilly imagine doing that, if my 4.5 year old 3TB Toshiba died. The issue is, buying a 3TB now would not be cheaper, than it was then.
  • neblogai - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    Edit: 5.5year old.
  • nandnandnand - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    How much was your 3 TB when you bought it? What kind (internal, external, portable)?
  • neblogai - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    It is internal, 81.6 British pounds, bought in Jan 2014 on Ebuyer. Yes, I know it can be found a little bit cheaper now- but, you know, 13 pounds cheaper after 5.5 years, in tech? Inflation alone was 11% 2014-2019.
  • quiksilvr - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    Cost of steel, import taxes, etc. are all huge factors. The big reason why HDD prices are still what they are at these capacities is because there is no cheap alternatives (yet) at these capacities and there is only so much optimization you can do. SSDs have basically toppled the HDD market in anything less than 1TB but they still cost over 2x as much in the 1TB realm and 3-4 times in 2TB because the difference in 1TB and 2TB in the HDD space is from $50 to $60, not $100 to $200 like an SSD.
  • imaheadcase - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    People still do use them for home servers for Media. Its not practical to stream or upload all type of content available. Esp if have shoddy internet access. While SSD drives are getting better in size and reliability...the price is not anything close yet to mass storage for all media types.

    Its not uncommon for people to have regular hardrives for 5-10 years of operation in a server for just homes. I think my oldest is from 2014 and still going strong.
  • MASSAMKULABOX - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    It should soon ... (?) be able to get a 1tb SSD for 80GBp .. at those sorts of prices I would prefer SSD to HDD. But anything larger is still too expensive ...QLC ????
  • MASSAMKULABOX - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    BTW those graphs are JAckson Pollocks
    (cockney RS)
  • Cygni - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    imagine still using "LUL" in 2k19
  • DigitalFreak - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    First!
  • cbm80 - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    "While Western Digital and Toshiba use conventional magnetic recording (CMR) for their 2.5" hard drives, Seagate makes use of shingled magnetic recording (SMR)."

    I don't think so. They all use SMR for current models.
  • ganeshts - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    I demonstrated that the WD My Passport 4TB drive is not SMR-based in the review, and WD has not updated the capacity point since that drive was launched. All the Toshiba Canvio drives top out at 4TB - at that capacity, there is no need to use SMR.
  • Sunday Afternoon - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    Your WD drive is from 2016. Are you sure that 4TB WD drives from 2019 are CMR?
  • cbm80 - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    The "need" is you can build a 4TB drive with 4 platters instead of 5. WD could have made a 5TB model but chose not to for some reason.
  • MGJ - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link

    Again as said in this thread (https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/what-consumer... for 2.5 inches hard disk drive:
    WD Blue WD20SPZX (2TB) and WD10SPZX (1TB),
    Toshiba HDWL120EZSTA (2TB), HDWL120UZSVA (2TB), HDWL110EZSTA (1TB), HDWL110UZSVA (1TB), HDWJ110EZSTA (1TB), HDWJ110UZSVA (1TB), MQ04ABD200 (2TB), MQ04ABF100 (1TB)
    These products are largely integrated in external USB enclosure (Toshiba Canvio, WD Elements, WD My Passport)
  • kepstin - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    These SMR drives seem to behave a lot more like SSDs than classic hard drives. The CMR section works similarly to SLC cache, the SMR regions are sort of like erase blocks, and I assume the drives do background GC to move data from cache to SMR regions. It's not clear from this review if there's performance degradation on a full drive like SSDs?
    I wonder if trim support would help the controller keep consistency up.
  • Sivar - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    This is an interesting way to look at it, but it makes sense.
    Benchmarks for small writes have not gone well for early SMR drives, though that may have improved since. I suspect they would make great storage drives for movies, music, images, or other large files.
  • abufrejoval - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link

    I wonder about the command set, too. Crystal disk info typically mentions TRIM support and doesn't show it the posted picture. Dunno if it asks HDDs for TRIM or if the command set is different.

    There must be some way to control that behavior otherwise the hyperscalers wouldn't have co-invented them with the HDD manufacturers.
  • Arbie - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    Thanks for the excellent article evaluating these drives and describing the state of SMR. It's good to see that the process has improved.

    Seagate nowadays makes it very difficult to determine before purchase if a drive is SMR or CMR. As a result I've gotten into the habit of just going for other brands first - not the best approach, certainly, but I'm only willing to do just so much research.
  • oRAirwolf - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    I use 7 of the 4TB Seagate drives shucked out of their enclosures in a Dell R620 SFF sitting in a data center. The drives have cold air constantly moving over them and see use as a RAID 5 storage array with the Dell H710P (LSI SAS2208) RAID controller handling everything. They are used for media storage and see very little write activity. These drives drop like flies. If I get 6 months out of them, I feel lucky. Of the 7 drives in the server over the past 1.5 years, I have had to replace 5 of them. I only use them because of their density and the fact I am kind of locked into them at this point. I would not recommend these things to my worst enemy, though.

    I would definitely spend the extra on a WD if it is going to be used with it's external enclosure. Sadly, the WD drives have the USB connector directly soldered to the drive, rather than using a SATA to USB adapter like the Seagate.

    Seeing as how bad their CMR drives are, though, I can't even imagine how bad the SMR drives are. Maybe it would help if they put an iron wolf sticker on them like their other drives. Then it would be strong like iron and loyal like wolf.
  • takeshi7 - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    The "cold air constantly moving over them" might be part of the problem. Hard drives like to operate at warm temperatures. They're designed that way
  • takeshi7 - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    And also running shucked drives in RAID just sounds like a terrible idea.
  • Qasar - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link

    sounds like oRAirwolf is using hdds that aren't made for the use case he is putting them in, and they are just wearing out, and as was mentioned.. the constant cold air.. cant be good. maybe went the inexpensive way vs the slightly more expensive way just to save a few bucks ?
  • BeethovensCat - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    Are there any rumors or reliable information about WD releasing a 5Tb or 6Tb version of their Passport/Elements series drives? I have a number of 3Tb drives and they are getting too small. Have been holding on to them in the hope that there will be a 5Tb version available sometime during 2019. Has anyone heard anything. Would like to avoid the large drives with power cables etc.
  • fmcjw - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    no innovation in this area. BTW, the article, being Anandtech, should've looked into background shuttling of data across shingles, which expend precious energy to gain performance (much like a TLC SSD), but also increase wear. And how about read performance compared to non-SMR drives?
  • fmcjw - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    no innovation for about 3 years, just enclosure changes.
  • sheh - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    Seagate's had a few bad 4TB models. ST4000DM001, and maybe DM005 and DX001. Models like DM000 seem better:

    https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-fo...
    https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-fo...
  • sheh - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    (This was a reply to oRAirwolf. Anandtech's commenting system fails to create a sub-comment without Javascript.)
  • sheh - Tuesday, June 18, 2019 - link

    22 hours to write the whole 5TB drive?!
  • abufrejoval - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link

    I am a little surprised, that a consistent sequential write to an SMR should drop the data rate below a non-shingled drive. AFAIK only updates-in-place of a shingle should trigger the SMR write-amplification, unless the firmware actually always writes to a none-shingled section of the drive first, similar to an SLC buffer on TLC/QLC SSDs. That seems to happen with the fio workload, but not with the backup: Otherwise its performance would have to drop similarly.

    I guess that is where SMRs would have a command set which allows applications to steer that behavior by hinting how data should be handled. And perhaps they should support a variant of TRIM, by which an OS could signal, which parts of a shingle no longer need preservation and avoid the write amplification.

    The problem is that without some low-level tool as a user you currently don't really have control over an SMR drive's behavior. The OS could/would/should know perhaps, that the large set of files you are copying are in fact intended to replace your last backup, but at the block level of a drive, without some help from the OS or a hint via a tool all that useful information is lost and the firmware needs to second guess your intentions.

    I don't think I have heard of any SMR specific optimizations on Windows, and to be honest not even on Linux. And then this isn't just OS but also file system specific and AFAIK exFAT isn't known for its sophistication.

    In any case I'd expect your experience to vary over the life-time of the drive. First time you fill it, it might be ok enough, but once you're into incremental backups replacing smallish files at near medium capacity, the 25% capacity increase may turn out too expensive in extra time.

    If you're doing full backups only, erasing first might help. But only, if there is a way to tell the drive that entire shingles don't need preservation.
  • Kastriot - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link

    Pricing for 5TB model is very tempting.
  • ballsystemlord - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link

    Only one grammar error, good work Ganesh!

    "Sustained sequential writes for a hour or more are not realistic workloads for a majority of the retail consumers."
    "an" not "a" (Yes, its an English idiosyncrasy, not the typical "an" before vowel "a" before consonent):
    "Sustained sequential writes for an hour or more are not realistic workloads for a majority of the retail consumers."
  • ballsystemlord - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link

    *consonant
  • austonia - Monday, June 24, 2019 - link

    The 5TB drives are often $95 or $100 at Costco. I have half dozen, they work fine.
  • badbanana - Tuesday, June 25, 2019 - link

    for those using such devices for backup, over time the files stored in this external HDDs would fail eventually (according to my findings). therefore i make sure to have another backup somewhere, like the cloud, to ensure that the files will be readable in the coming years. that's my plan B.

    for the rest of you, what are your plan Bs?
  • Chloiber - Saturday, June 29, 2019 - link

    Interesting read, thanks!
    We often use external hard disks from WD to create archives of certain datasets (usually very large, single files) and had to use the 5TB Seagate version for the first time as we exceeded 4TB.
    I did notice that it took very long for the copy - I don't think I have kept the logs, but this would explain a lot!
  • Pizdatron - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link

    Ive had 2 Seagate drives die on me on first week, replace by warranty then happen again to one drive, no Seagate for me any longer. Wd never died on me even once
  • DigDeep - Tuesday, October 1, 2019 - link

    I fell for Seagate Barracuda 2TB 256mb cache 7200RPM ST2000DM008 advertising of 256mb cache and 220mbs sustained speed. While copying speed drops to 10mbs and sometimes next copying starts at 40mbs or less. This is my first Seagate drive and last :) I never had this issues with WD, I will replace it for WD20EZAZ, if it will availible, if not then for WD20EZRZ. I noticed Access times are very big for Seagate disks.

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