AndyChow

Hello, joined just to comment on this. These disks are SMR. I got one a little more than a month ago. Unfortunately can't return it because I didn't keep the packaging. I've already got 4728 bad sectors on it. You have to understand the technology. SMR disks keep the random writes on an outer partition sequentially. When the disk is idle, it will start doing garbage collection and do the writes on the actual tracks, in which every track on the affected band must be re-written. So, performance is usually 180MB reads and writes. But top the persistent outer partition, and speeds crawl to 20-30 MB. This seems to happen after several hundred GB, which you hit often if you do things like balance or defrag or mass-convert data. BTW, if you've stopped using your drive, and it's still spinning and the head is moving, DON'T turn it off. It's doing it's garbage collection. It can take up to 10 hours to complete garbage collection. Unfortunately, my use-case involved continuous read-write operations for days on end. This killed the drive. I'm trying to see if I can't remove the bad sectors by not submitting the disk to the normal workload, just as an occasionnal backup. To be fair, these disks are fine as external backups (which is how they are sold), but completely unfit for raid use.