Pauses when transferring files between drives

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EviLClouD

266 posts

Ultimate Geek

#3115791 14-Aug-2023 17:21

Detruire:
I have experienced similar behaviour with SMR drives - presumably when the cache and/or buffer (non-shingled) zone has filled up; dying drives; and USB-attached drives.

The drive shown in the first screenshot (ST2000DM008) is a SMR drive according to this drive manual, so the pauses may simply be inherent to the drive.

Oh that’s interesting to know thanks!
So in the future if i was to upgrade the HDD in my desktop to one with higher capacity for storage is it worth exploring the Ironwolf line of drives? Or would the Barracuda still be sufficient?

Detruire

1772 posts

Uber Geek

#3117280 17-Aug-2023 18:34

EviLClouD:
Detruire:

I have experienced similar behaviour with SMR drives - presumably when the cache and/or buffer (non-shingled) zone has filled up; dying drives; and USB-attached drives.

The drive shown in the first screenshot (ST2000DM008) is a SMR drive according to this drive manual, so the pauses may simply be inherent to the drive.

Oh that’s interesting to know thanks!
So in the future if i was to upgrade the HDD in my desktop to one with higher capacity for storage is it worth exploring the Ironwolf line of drives? Or would the Barracuda still be sufficient?

I think that the enterprise ranges such as Exos are less likely to be SMR than the consumer ranges such as Barracuda.

However, I'd suggest checking manuals and spec sheets to be sure for a specific drive model, because the same range may incorporate drives of both types - which has happened before in the case of WD Red NAS drives.

rm *

fe31nz

1233 posts

Uber Geek

#3117338 17-Aug-2023 22:40

The Seagate Exos range does not include SMR drives - that is a different range. The Exos drives are high capacity helium filled fast enterprise class drives. I have one of the current largest model, the Exos X20 (20 Tbytes) and it is excellent so far.

There are now very large drives that are SMR that are only offered to massively large customers for data centre use as they to not have the normal SATA interface and require the operating system to use special SMR drivers. They do not normally appear on the public web sites, but are offered to specific customers. The SMR drives that are publicly advertised are normally the ones that have the SMR processing code on board and can be used with most operating systems, as long as the OS version is recent enough to have the code that allows for very long (up to a minute or so) timeouts while the shingle updating happens. When I got my first SMR drive (Seagate ST8000AS0002, 8 Tbyte), the Ubuntu kernel I was running at the time did not handle the timeout. Fortunately, the next kernel update about a week later had the patch for that. But that was over seven years ago now.

After the scandal of people being sold SMR drives without knowing about it, I would now hope that all sellers make sure that the CMR/SMR status of the drives is obvious. It certainly is on the Seagate and WD sites, and I would expect that if they went back to their old hiding of the CMR/SMR status they would get a class action suit pretty rapidly. But I always download the full spec sheet anyway as there are various other things I always want to check on, such as power use and noise levels.

EviLClouD

266 posts

Ultimate Geek

#3117747 18-Aug-2023 16:56

fe31nz:

The Seagate Exos range does not include SMR drives - that is a different range. The Exos drives are high capacity helium filled fast enterprise class drives. I have one of the current largest model, the Exos X20 (20 Tbytes) and it is excellent so far.

There are now very large drives that are SMR that are only offered to massively large customers for data centre use as they to not have the normal SATA interface and require the operating system to use special SMR drivers. They do not normally appear on the public web sites, but are offered to specific customers. The SMR drives that are publicly advertised are normally the ones that have the SMR processing code on board and can be used with most operating systems, as long as the OS version is recent enough to have the code that allows for very long (up to a minute or so) timeouts while the shingle updating happens. When I got my first SMR drive (Seagate ST8000AS0002, 8 Tbyte), the Ubuntu kernel I was running at the time did not handle the timeout. Fortunately, the next kernel update about a week later had the patch for that. But that was over seven years ago now.

After the scandal of people being sold SMR drives without knowing about it, I would now hope that all sellers make sure that the CMR/SMR status of the drives is obvious. It certainly is on the Seagate and WD sites, and I would expect that if they went back to their old hiding of the CMR/SMR status they would get a class action suit pretty rapidly. But I always download the full spec sheet anyway as there are various other things I always want to check on, such as power use and noise levels.

Thank you for the explanation!

So if i were to purchase a new HDD (8TB for example) which would you recommend out of these? Would be used primarily for backup/data storage within a desktop pc.

https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/HDDSE2210/Seagate-BarraCuda-8TB-35-Internal-HDD-SATA3-6Gbs (SMR)

https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/HDDWD1980/WD-Blue-Edition-8TB-35-Internal-HDD-SATA3---5640-R (CMR)

https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/HDDSE8181/Seagate-IronWolf-8TB-NAS-Internal-HDD-SATA-6Gbs (CMR)

fe31nz

1233 posts

Uber Geek

#3117887 19-Aug-2023 01:17

Which drive would depend on exactly how you will be using it. If you are going to have it running 24/7 and want a long lifetime, then you probably should be getting the Seagate Ironwolf one, despite the significant price difference. If you want to put it on an external drive mount and have it turned off most of the time then the WD Blue drive would be fine. They are not rated for 24/7 use and will eventually die if used that way, but are fine if you are using them only for a few hours at at time.

The Seagate SMR drive is rated for a better lifetime and should be good for 24/7 operation. It is decently fast when not rewriting shingled tracks, but as it fills up will have very slow write access at times when it does shingle rewrites. If you are happy to just do backups to it and leave them running in the background for however long they take, it is a good drive. If you want to be able to copy data to it manually and sit in front of the PC while it happens, the shingle rewrites will be infuriating as the time to copy even a small file may suddenly take a minute or two. And as it gets full, there will be frequent shingle rewrites. I only use my SMR drives for storage of my older TV recordings on an Ubuntu box and archival storage on a Windows PC, and they are fine for those purposes. The SM8000AS002 I have for archival storage in my Windows PC is up to 62810 power on hours 24/7 (over 7 years) and I would expect it to keep on going to at least 10 years as it has been full for some time and gets very little write traffic now. It basically got filled up and I am now filling up another bigger drive, a Seagate Exos ST12000NM0007.

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