I'm going to China around the end of August and plan to pick a few things up. I want to replace a few Toshiba DT01ACA300 3TB drives with an 8TB drive. I will use the drive for storage and seeding a large number of torrents. These three drives are reasonably priced, are any better or worse for the job? I run software on a Samsung 830 256GB which I will be upgrading later in the year. Seagate 8TB SkyHawk AV Surveillance HDD ST8000VX0022 – £121 Seagate 8TB ST8000NM0055 Exos 7E8 Enterprise – £138 Hitachi Ultrastar He8 HUH728080ALN600 - £111 Toshiba Enterprise MG05ACA800E - £111
Nothing wrong with SMR, so long as the task is predominantly write once read many for large contiguous files. My Seagate 8TB archive drive has been humming along 24/7 for over 3 years now without any issues. I have hardly deleted anything since I bought it, but I think I'm down to my last 800GB, so a purge will be due sometime next year.
Nothing wrong with SMR, so long as you're using this very specific and uncommon-for-consumers workload. I stand by my statement.
Nothing wrong with SMR if you know it's limitations, but all else being equal, definitely go for a PMR drive over an SMR drive because with PMR there aren't such limitations. I'm no market researcher (oh wait, yes I am*), but I would think that "write big files and leave them there for occasional access" is right up the alley of consumers looking towards 8TB disks. *Though storage related, in a markedly different market. But in this context of this post, no I'm not, it just tickled me
And no matter what you do: Always have a full & recent backup on a physically separate device. Data loss is not an if but when.
There's that, and there's also never modifying them. Fine for siticking in your NAS for your Blu-ray rips, not so much for your Steam library or virtual machines.
I pity the foo' that runs more than a couple VMs from a single spinning disk of any sort, let alone many TB of them. I may be out of touch with PC games, but just thinking about how much space some PS4 games can take up, point taken on the Steam library!
Most manufacturers don't like to disclose it, so the info may be buried in some datasheet or omitted entirely. But the write speed will be significantly lower with SMR drives, so if you spot suspiciously low declared write speeds (or low write speeds mentioned in a review) stay away. As for the 4 drives mentioned: Seagate 8TB SkyHawk AV Surveillance HDD ST8000VX0022 Undeclared by Seagate, as surveillance is write heavy it is extremely unlikely to be SMR, also write performance in reviews too good for SMR Seagate 8TB ST8000NM0055 Exos 7E8 Enterprise CMR according to datasheet Hitachi Ultrastar He8 HUH728080ALN600 PMR Toshiba Enterprise MG05ACA800E Undeclared, not finding much in ways of reviews either
Drop the AV drive completely for anything other than recording surveillance feeds. The entire point of those drives is that they never throw any sort of write error. They just keep on continuously writing and reporting that it was a success, regardless of whether the bit was written correctly or not. They only make sense for applications like surveillance recording where it is more important to have constant availability to write live footage and any momentary errors are tolerable.