Western Digital: Over Half of Data Center HDDs Will Use SMR by 2023
Western Digital said at OCP Global Summit last week that over half of hard drives for data centers will use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology in 2023. At present Western Digital is the only supplier of SMR HDDs managed by hosts, but the technology is gaining support by hardware, software, and applications.
[...] High-capacity hard drives are not going to be replaced by high-capacity SSDs any time soon, according to Western Digital. HDDs will continue to cost significantly less than SSDs on per-TB basis. Therefore, they will be used to store 6.5 times more data than datacenter SSDs in 2023.
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Western Digital gets sued for sneaking SMR disks into its NAS channel
All three of the surviving conventional hard drive vendors—Toshiba, Western Digital, and Seagate—have gotten caught sneaking disks featuring Shingled Magnetic Recording technology into unexpected places recently. But Western Digital has been the most brazen of the three, and it's been singled out for a class action lawsuit in response.
Although all three major manufacturers quietly added SMR disks to their desktop hard drive line-up, Western Digital is the only one so far to slip them into its NAS (Network Attached Storage) stack. NAS drives are expected to perform well in RAID and other multiple disk arrays, whether ZFS pools or consumer devices like Synology or Netgear NAS appliances.
In sharp contrast to Western Digital's position on SMR disks as NAS, Seagate executive Greg Belloni told us that there weren't any SMR disks in the Ironwolf (competitor to Western Digital Red) line-up now and that the technology is not appropriate for that purpose.
[...] Hattis Law has initiated a class action lawsuit against Western Digital, accordingly. The lawsuit alleges both that the SMR technology in the newer Western Digital Red drives is inappropriate for the marketed purpose of the drives and that Western Digital deliberately "deceived and harm[ed] consumers" in the course of doing so.
Previously: AnandTech Interview With Seagate's CTO: New HDD Technologies Coming
Western Digital: Over Half of Data Center HDDs Will Use SMR by 2023
Seagate Caught Using SMR in Barracuda Compute and Desktop Drives
(Score: 1) by jbruchon on Wednesday March 20 2019, @11:58AM (1 child)
Translation: "Over half of data center HDDs will suck." I get it though; higher densities and data that often sits in place for a very long time without being written over make it sensible to drop these in. I'd guess that SMR drives and their notoriously wacky performance characteristics tend to even out behind a SSD cache though. I couldn't find anyone posting about SMR + bcache SSD with a cursory search though, probably because off-the-shelf 10TB non-SMR WD drives are available dirt cheap in the form of shuckable WD EasyStores, practically the cost-per-TB Holy Grail of r/DataHoarder today. SMR doesn't make sense for normal human beings if faster alternatives are available around the same price point.
I'm just here to listen to the latest song about butts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 20 2019, @02:40PM
SMR HDD is basically just the opposite of SSD, cheap and slow rather than fast and spendy.
SMR HDD is filling the "almost a tape drive, but with faster reads" niche.
Thing is, storage needs are not equal, some people need one thing some need another, it is good to have all use cases covered.
Admittedly, when my employer first explained what SMR was, my mind just boggled as I couldn't understand the use case for it either. Then he said, "Netflix needs to write things once and read them a bunch of times, others do too."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 20 2019, @12:45PM (4 children)
Bugaboo will go mainstream.
Source: I sell bugaboo.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday March 20 2019, @01:49PM (2 children)
Plenty of SMR drives are being sold, and WD, Seagate, and Toshiba will be selling them. They are playing to their strengths: density and low cost.
If they do manage to maintain a $/TB gap with SSDs, they can keep selling bugaboo for years to come.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday March 20 2019, @02:57PM (1 child)
These are for near-cold storage arrays, and likely, the disks themselves are centrally managed via some sort of fancy array application. SMR's in a typical "box" tend to fare poorly, if perhaps due to misplaced expectations. Applications and people (professionals/enthusiasts/whatever positive term one ascribes to oneself) will likely avoid these if they are also not buying based on being cheap.
Sometimes you don't need even modest hardware to perform the function you need, though. Having a raid of flash storage on a 1gb ethernet connection to a $20 5 port switch that just ends up transmitting over some consumer wireless home network anyway through some other RGB festooned access point system shows the high performance and success of marketing, and do not always reflect the fruits of professionalism...
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday March 20 2019, @03:24PM
Some consumer-oriented drives use SMR. I'm not sure how common it is though:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/what-consumer-hard-drives-have-smr-platters.2525313/ [anandtech.com]
Depending on your application, it might be worth it to accept SMR downsides for an extra 1 TB.
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(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday March 20 2019, @04:53PM
Sell me a bugaboo! Now! I can't wait to get in on this great offer!!!
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by TheFool on Wednesday March 20 2019, @03:17PM
The main sticking point of SMR for a long time was that it couldn't be host- based, at least not in enterprise. Although Windows consumers are generally fine with HW vendor provided crapware (ah, sorry - "value add software"), most enterprise customers refused to run it. Did they finally accept their fate, or did SCSI finally get to the point that the data center folks could write their own management software? Or did some entirely different shift happen?