Re: [LUG] consumer non-SMR 2.5" hard drives

[comrade meowski <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx>]

On 03/12/2021 16:15, Simon Avery wrote:

> I think the tumbleweed means either everyone else was away from their 
> email for a while like I was, or is an answer in itself.
>
> I must admit SMR was something that had passed me utterly by, I've not 
> bought non-SSD drives for myself for some years, and I've had an 
> educating time reading up about them and the problems, and it's 
> reconfirmed my cynicism about marketing and hardware manufacturers...
>
> I'm afraid I can't shed much light, other than bothering Google and 
> turning up such things as
>
> https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/list-of-known-smr-drives.141/ <https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/list-of-known-smr-drives.141/> 
>
> and
> https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/ 
> <https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/>
>
> But you no doubt have found such things anyway.
>
> Manufacturers aren't exactly advertising this for obvious reasons, and 
> the average user probablu cares more about capacity than performance in 
> their spinny media, so the odds are against you I'm afraid.

Thanks chief - that was exactly how I was reading things as well. 
Sometimes the lack of response can be a response in itself! Either 
nobody knows or nobody cares which is a way of reality telling you: 
"nice try, now roll up your sleeves and fix it yourself". Fair enough I 
guess.

My hope was that someone else doing professional IT and similarly sick 
of looking for lists of non-SMR drives online would have done my 
homework for me and found a handy Reddit thread or some other convenient 
community maintained googledocs spreadsheet out there with a current 
list. I'm pretty sure they are out there somewhere and I'm just not 
looking hard enough. I tried r/datahoarder as pretty much the first 
option and while there's plenty of scattered info, no convenient "buyers 
guide".

Oh well, back to shopping and research I guess. Like you I don't buy 
anything that isn't either SSD/NVME or (much) higher capacity pro HDDs 
for myself - crappy 2Tb bottom of the barrel USB consumer drives are 
unfortunately a necessary evil for a lot of people though.


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