How/Where to select/find good Hardisks details and reviews?

[minraws]

Hello there folks(this is my first post here, so sorry if I missed some convention),

I am looking at HardDisks, for mass storage something around 3-4TBs so that I can store my project data on it that I am not currently working on with my SSD being used for actively worked on projects, though I might use it for gaming.

I would prefer to avoid something like SMR, but I am still not sure which brands would be nice and how should I confirm which drives are/aren’t SMR. (I live in India so can’t say for sure if the marketing is accurate here on Amazon and such…)

Like, one of the indian site lists, hxxps://mdcomputers.in/seagate-2tb-barracuda-st2000dm008.html
Which as per,
hxxps://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/list-of-known-smr-drives.141/
(sorry couldn’t include links so replaced https with hxxps)

Is SMR(it was also listed on Amazon India now sold out). So is SMR fine? I am quite confused.

Then there is spinning up/down issues, preferrably something that has more consistent performance in case I have to use it for day-to-day or gaming(yeah storing 300gig games on it is not convenient).

So yeah, if there is a good place that has some kind of list I could look at, it would be nice.
Unless you folks would like to suggest some.

I am not quite so well informed of all the things involved in making such a decisions so.
Thanks in advance for any bit of help.

[ReverendEight]

First and foremost, welcome.

Second, the whole SMR debacle mostly revolves around the manufacturers not reporting lots of CMR drives as SMR drives. This means that sometimes, if you buy the right thing, and the seller thinks it’s the right thing, it still might not be the right thing. Amazon also mingles stock from sellers which just makes matters worse. So, let’s not chance it.

Western Digital, after getting caught, has been very clear where they haven’t yet put ny SMR drives: WD Black, WD Purple, and WD Red Pro (the last of which is a new branding for non-SMR Red dives). Amazon link to WD Black

You should just assume WD Red and WD Blue drives are SMR.

Toshiba’s N300 to date haven’t been caught with SMR. Amazon link to N300

Seagate also as far as I know asn’t been caught sneaking them into Ironwolf drives. Amazon link to Ironwolf here

The tough part is knowing if there’s new sneaky behavior - and as of yet, we don’t. This could change at any time, and there’s no way to be 100% sure until it’s plugged in.

Performance wise, most SATA drives are basically the same. Higher speed (7200rpm vs 5400rpm) and bigger cache sizes can help, but only so much. As for reliability, Backblaze’s historical data is the only source I know - a real data center posting their own results after years of use.

Also, I don’t know what prices look like for you, but you can take the ASIN right out of the URL I provided (look for the bit at the end like B07H289S79 or whatever) and stick it into your local Amazon search bar for the same item.

So is SMR fine? I am quite confused.

Finally: SMR is fine for read access, but garbage for write access. This also causes lots of problems for NAS uses. If write speed isn’t a big deal? SMR is fine.

Good hunting.

[TheCakeIsNaOH]

SMR is fine for read only operations, especially sequential reads, and sequential write operations.

That means that they are great for backup drives, or for video storage. They would be acceptable for game storage, but CMR would probably be better. Day to day file storage would depend on what kind of things you are doing.

What they are really problematic for is for disk arrays, and specifically, raid 5/6 and raidz.

[MazeFrame]

@TheCakeIsNaOH

and sequential write operations.

Not sure about that. When you write on the inner part of a disk, your disk needs to rewrite all outer parts slowing further writes down.