Turns out there’s a whole Reddit subforum devoted to the subject of digital data hoarding. And of course the activity has a long history, from well before the era of digital electronic computers <https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/04/digital-hoarders-our-terabytes-are-put-to-use-for-the-betterment-of-mankind/>.
On Mon, 13 Apr 2020 10:42:49 +1200, I wrote:
Turns out there’s a whole Reddit subforum devoted to the subject of digital data hoarding.
Found another mention of it in this article <https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shingled-magnetic-recording/> where some data hoarders claim that Western Digital is shipping them SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives badged as CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording). The shingled drives aren’t designed for RAID use, and keep throwing up errors on a configuration change (“resilvering”), when write operations take longer than expected. Or the whole data-rebalancing operation ends up taking days instead of hours <https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/shingled-drives-have-non-shingled-zones-for-caching-writes/>.
On Thu, 16 Apr 2020 12:38:56 +1200, I wrote:
... some data hoarders claim that Western Digital is shipping them SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives badged as CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording).
And not just WD doing this, but Seagate as well <https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/seagate-2-4-and-8tb-barracuda-and-desktop-hdd-smr/>.
On Thu, 16 Apr 2020 19:51:08 +1200, I wrote:
And not just WD doing this, but Seagate as well ...
... and Toshiba to add to the collection, of vendors selling SMR drives without telling their customers <https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/16/toshiba-desktop-disk-drives-undocumented-shingle-magnetic-recording/>.
On Fri, 17 Apr 2020 19:33:01 +1200, I wrote:
... and Toshiba to add to the collection, of vendors selling SMR drives without telling their customers <https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/16/toshiba-desktop-disk-drives-undocumented-shingle-magnetic-recording/>.
Toshiba has now been forthcoming <https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/29/toshiba-consumer-disk-drives-smr-list/> with details of which of its desktop-type drives are using SMR. That article also mentions a category of drives specifically designed for “video surveillance”. Well, I suppose SMR is acceptable for an application like that, where the writes are mostly sequential.
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro