Thanks for the heads up on SMR drives I had no idea they had it, Do you have a list of drives that aren’t SMR? Is the telltale sign the amount of cache alone?
Cache is probably a hint, but they intentionally hide it from their spec sheets. Just googling is pretty much the only way to find out. And the answer is unfortunately not always easy to find.
Yeah ive been searching everywhere there’s really no definitive answer because they are just re branding the drives, even the high end drives that are supposed to be used for “NAS” This is unfortunate I just bought some new drives that are probably SMR…
For Exos it is actually pretty clear. They have the E line for cheap storage and the X line for performance. E is SMR, X is PMR.
It looks like cache doesn’t tell us much anyway, all their drives seem to have moved to 256MB cache. I guess it’s rare that use cases are actually significantly impacted. Any HDD that gets a little bit of down time once in a while probably won’t see the big downsides. But this month so far, our node HDD’s have not gotten a break.