Recently I bought (see other topic) an external USB drive from WD, hoping it would be not SMR, but it turned out to be such.

 

Are there any non-SMR USB drives on the market at the lower price range?

I'm loking at sizes of 5-6 TB.

AFAIK Toshiba doesn't have any 3.5" SMR drives, so any external 3.5" will be CMR, they do use SMR on 2.5" drives.

Well, they also have 50% higher prices...

Well, I'm afraid not many other options, you could go for WD 8TB, those are CMR, at least for now.

I got a WD My Book 8 TB (WDBBGB0080HBK-EESN) and after some testing it looks like a non-SMR drive.

 

See CDM screenshot attached (the disk was 99.999% full, to make it "sweat", the test with 0% full is almost the same except the SEQ values being 199MB/s).

 

Also test with FIO as per this post suggests it is not SMR. The summary:
 

TEST: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=4768: Tue Sep 10 22:24:49 2019
  write: IOPS=7, BW=73.2MiB/s (76.8MB/s)(85.8GiB/1200024msec)
    slat (usec): min=353, max=4294.0k, avg=2579.76, stdev=71064.79
    clat (usec): min=2, max=9319.4k, avg=69451.95, stdev=100307.35
     lat (msec): min=35, max=402895, avg=136.54, stdev=4401.42
    clat percentiles (msec):
     |  1.00th=[   41],  5.00th=[   47], 10.00th=[   51], 20.00th=[   57],
     | 30.00th=[   61], 40.00th=[   64], 50.00th=[   67], 60.00th=[   70],
     | 70.00th=[   74], 80.00th=[   80], 90.00th=[   87], 95.00th=[   93],
     | 99.00th=[  114], 99.50th=[  188], 99.90th=[  234], 99.95th=[  239],
     | 99.99th=[ 9329]
   bw (  KiB/s): min=19922, max=183585, per=100.00%, avg=144614.45, stdev=17834.58, samples=1226
   iops        : min=    1, max=   17, avg=13.38, stdev= 1.78, samples=1226
  lat (usec)   : 4=0.02%, 20=0.02%, 50=0.05%, 100=0.01%
  lat (msec)   : 50=9.84%, 100=87.85%, 250=2.17%, 500=0.02%
  cpu          : usr=0.33%, sys=0.42%, ctx=0, majf=0, minf=0
  IO depths    : 1=100.0%, 2=0.0%, 4=0.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
     submit    : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
     complete  : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
     issued rwts: total=0,8788,0,0 short=0,0,0,0 dropped=0,0,0,0
     latency   : target=0, window=0, percentile=100.00%, depth=1

Run status group 0 (all jobs):
  WRITE: bw=73.2MiB/s (76.8MB/s), 73.2MiB/s-73.2MiB/s (76.8MB/s-76.8MB/s), io=85.8GiB (92.1GB), run=1200024-1200024msec

 

Edited September 10, 20196 yr by xerces8

8 hours ago, xerces8 said:

I got a WD My Book 8 TB (WDBBGB0080HBK-EESN) and after some testing it looks like a non-SMR drive.

Like mentioned WD doesn't have any 8TB SMR drives, only 2 and 6TB, at least for now.