This articles might be of interest if you are thinking about SMR drives.
http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/seagate-8tb-archive-hdd-review,2-822.html
http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/shingled-magnetic-recoding-smr-101-basics,2-933.html#mainSection
While there are caveats related to actual use, the summary is:
Pros: Sequential write speed, Random read speed, Amazing price point.
Cons: Sequential read and random write performance, 3-year Warranty
quote:
"Our object storage and content repository testing illustrates good performance characteristics for the Archive HDDs intended workload environments. In light of its low cost, and slower 5,900-RPM motor in comparison to the other drives in the test, the Archive HDD delivered impressive performance and scored a clear win in these workloads.
Outside of object storage architectures — or other designs that aggregate the performance of many drives (yet accesses them separately) — the possibility of inconsistency can significantly hamper performance. It is important to restrict the drives to “SMR-friendly” sequential write workloads to avoid what we observed after exposing the drives to variable (and randomized) workloads."
and
"the sequential read results are markedly different after the drive has experienced a range of variable (and randomized) workloads" with "wild swings in performance"
I also note that the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF, hours) is 2M for the enterprise drives and 850,000 for the archive drive and it's 5,900-RPM speed compared to 7200-RPM for enterprise drives.
Also I note that at the moment SMR drives are "drive managed" meaning they look like normal HDD to the server hardware/OS and is backwards compatible. Host-Managed SMR drives are not backwards compatible but may deliver performance advantages in the future.
dan
* Dr Daniel Traynor, Grid cluster system manager
* Tel +44(0)20 7882 6560, Particle Physics,QMUL
|