On Sun, 12 Aug 2018 03:36:08 -0400, Paul wrote:

Mark Perkins wrote:
On Wed, 8 Aug 2018 20:37:01 -0500, Lynn McGuire
wrote:

"Why I Will Never Buy a Hard Drive Again"

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ch...ves,37563.html

"It’s been years since I was willing to work on any PC that boots from a
mechanical hard drive. Once you get used to the snappy response times
and speedier gameload times of an SSD, going back to a hard drive feels
like computing through a thick layer of molasses."

Lynn

If you were buying a 'large' drive now, what would you buy? SMR seems
like something to be avoided, so if I want a drive in the 8-10-12+
range, what's available?

Not just asking Lynn, anyone can chime in.

PMR is still used to sell "premium" products, and
a Google search is likely to find units using PMR.
The marketing department knows the value of PMR,
and "leaks" the info to bump sales.

https://www.kitguru.net/components/h...rive-review/2/

On some lesser products of unknown parentage, you're
forced to use deductive reasoning. If you see a
4TB drive in a 0.8" high enclosure, with what
seems like two 2TB platters (datasheet doesn't
list platters), then you can kinda guess it's SMR.
SMR caching is now better than it was.

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads...tters.2525313/

You even have to be careful now, with your HDTune
usage. Do test runs in both Win7 and Win10 and
compare, before publishing. As a recent Win10 release
seems to be pulling the rug out from underneath
HDTune 2.55. When attempting to identify PMR versus
SMR, you can't let yourself be distracted by Windows 10
behaviors.

Interesting, thanks. I guess I'm not the only one thinking it's best to
avoid SMR for everyday general use, although if I'm reading correctly,
SMR isn't as much of a dog now as it was when it was introduced. They've
probably figured out and optimized the caching algorithm.