xerces8 Posted August 23, 2019 Share Posted August 23, 2019 I purchased a WD 6 TB My Book Desktop Hard Drive - Black WDBBGB0060HBK (from Amazon, see link) and after running CDM is seems like it is a SMR drive: Did WD start selling SMR units? Or am I misinterpreting the results? Is there a reliable test to determine if a unit is SMR or not? Quote Link to comment
JorgeB Posted August 23, 2019 Share Posted August 23, 2019 29 minutes ago, xerces8 said: Did WD start selling SMR units? Yes, there are 2TB and 6TB SMR drives, in both Red and Blue line: Red 2TB - WD20EFAX Red 6TB - WD60EFAX Blue 2TB - WD20EZAZ Blue 6TB - WD60EZAZ AFAIK currently these are the only WD 3.5" SMR drives. Quote Link to comment
xerces8 Posted August 23, 2019 Author Share Posted August 23, 2019 fsck... I bought WD to avoid SMR Quote Link to comment
xerces8 Posted August 25, 2019 Author Share Posted August 25, 2019 (edited) CrystalDiskInfo says: Enclosure : WD My Book 25EE USB Device (V=1058, P=25EE, sa1) - Model : WDC WD60EDAZ-11BMZB0 Firmware : 80.00A80MZB0 Edited August 25, 2019 by xerces8 typo in drive model Quote Link to comment
JorgeB Posted August 26, 2019 Share Posted August 26, 2019 20 hours ago, xerces8 said: WD60EDAZ That's likely a white label drive, not available outside an enclosure. Quote Link to comment
mgutt Posted September 2, 2021 Share Posted September 2, 2021 Only for those who are interested how to verify SMR. The easiest way is to check the CDM benchmark. In the above example the benchmark resulted >10 MB/s for random writes. This is - as of today - impossible for CMR drives, so it must be a SMR. Compare the results with SMR benchmarks here (the fastest SMR drive reached 5 MB/s, which fits to the 250 MB/s for sequential writes): https://www.hardwareluxx.de/index.php/artikel/hardware/storage/49350-sieben-6-tb-festplatten-verschiedener-hersteller-im-test.html?start=10 Another method is to set more cycles in CDM and after it wrote multiple times the 4K random writes, copy the benchmark file that was generated on the disk through CDM to an external target. Now you can interrupt CDM (which usually deletes this file) and by that only a sequential copy transfer is running and if it is an SMR drive, it will be super slow (< 20 MB/s) as it needs to jump between media cache tracks (4K writes are cached here) and usual data tracks. By hearing or measuring the power consumption, there is even a third method. Wait for the multiple 4K random writes, copy the benchmark file and close CDM. Stop the copy transfer and directly after that the drive starts to clean the Media Cache, which is clearly audible (like a white noise). Power Consumption Example: This is why the power consumption of SMR drives is much higher than expected. Quote Link to comment
Lolight Posted September 2, 2021 Share Posted September 2, 2021 WD publishes complete list of SMR drives following user backlash: https://www.techspot.com/news/84973-wd-publishes-complete-list-smr-drives-following-user.html Quote Link to comment
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