Before you hate SMR, you must first understand what SMR technology is?

CMR refers to the traditional track technology, PMR is the perpendicular magnetic recording technology in the CMR technology, and can generally be considered as CMR = PMR, and the SMR shingled disk technology is to overlap part of the tracks together, which is similar to the roof tiles. It is to increase the storage density and increase the capacity by 25% in the traditional technology.

However, the cost of SMR technology is not small. Data cannot be randomly written due to data stacking. As long as continuous writing is performed through a large cache, reliability will also decrease.

Nevertheless, because SMR can increase the capacity of HDD hard drives, Western Digital and Seagate have been vigorously promoting the development of SMR hard drives since 2015, and their proportion in the future will only increase, at least to 50%.

Previously, HDD manufacturers were more conscientious, using SMR technology on some products, which can still be distinguished from PMR hard drives. Now they are mixed. It is also possible to use SMR hard drives in the same series of hard drives.

The breaking news of Western Digital is the use of SMR technology on the Red Disk series, which is the main reliability. There is a mixture of SMR and CMR. Specifically, 2TB-6TB is SMR, and 8 ~ 14TB is CMR.

Not only Western Digital, but the German Computerbase website stated that Seagate is doing the same, and it is also a mixed use of SMR and CMR hard drives, but it is not clear that the previous method of using TRIM support to judge whether it is SMR or CMR hard drives is no longer useful.

In short, on this road, the two major manufacturers of Western Digital and Seagate are very tacit, anyway, it is impossible to give up SMR technology, only step by step, let everyone gradually get used to it.