Seagate Caught Using SMR in Barracuda Compute and Desktop Drives
An Anonymous Coward writes:
SMR hard drive encoding is generally higher density but slower than traditional perpendicular recording.
Seagate 'submarines' SMR into 3 Barracuda drives and a Desktop HDD - Blocks and Files
Some Seagate Barracuda Compute and Desktop disk drives use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology which can exhibit slow data write speeds. But Seagate documentation does not spell this out.
Yesterday we reported Western Digital has submarined SMR drives into certain WD Red NAS drives. The company acknowledged this when we asked but it has not documented the use of SMR in the WD Red drives. This has left many users frustrated and speculating for the reason why the new drives are not working properly in their NAS set-ups. Since this article was first published Toshiba has also confirmed the undocumented use of SMR in some desktop hard drives.
[...] Seagate markets the Barracuda Compute drives as fast and dependable. Yet it is the nature of SMR drives that data rewrites can be slow.
When we asked Seagate about the Barracudas and the Desktop HDD using SMR technology, a spokesperson told us: "I confirm all four products listed use SMR technology."
In a follow-up question, we asked why isn't this information is not explicit in Seagate's brochures, data sheets and product manuals - as it is for Exos and Archive disk drives?
Seagate's spokesperson said: "We provide technical information consistent with the positioning and intended workload for each drive."
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.