I’m looking for non-shingled spinning 2.5" SATA drives
- due to data storage policies, it must NOT be a SSD but a spinning drive
- due to the use of ZFS, it can’t be a SMR
- 1Tb or more (2Tb would be nice)
- ideally 9.5 mm or thinner (7mm would be preferred for a better airflow, 15 mm would require a 3d-printed cover)
- ideally new (new-old stock and used drives would require a few days of testing to validate the SMART info and the absence of bad sectors)
I’ve heard the WD Blue 2.5" and the Seagate Exos might be valid options:
- WD Blue report from /u/HTWingNut: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1467pi0/til_there_is_a_25_1tb_cmr_drive_from_toshiba_but/jnpeb26/
- Seagate Exos report from /u/Far_Marsupial6303 to /u/MonsieurCellophane who was looking for 4Tb options: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/12xawar/25_4tb_nonsmr_hdds/jhjc5fk/
If you know about other options, could you please list them?
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There isn’t.
3.5" HDD’s or 2.5" SSD’s are your options.
Bear in mind that some of the higher-performance SAS drives have an onboard NAND write cache (hybrid drive).
Doesn’t really exist, going to be SAS (1.2tb or 2.4tb) or SSD, the sata 2.5" market really doesn’t exist much outside of portable drives anymore
Seagate Backup Plus Slim & Backup Plus Fast USB drives from a few years back are shuckable and have 1TB or 2TB Seagate 2.5" drives in them from pre-shingled days. Fast is 4TB (2×2TB in RAID-0). I have shucked a number of the 2TB and they contained Seagate ST2000LM003 drives. Not sure but I believe these are all 5400 rpm. You may be able to find some new.
I am also a fan of the HGST Travelstar 7K1000 which is a 1TB 7200 rpm drive. Bought those as bare drives and they performed well.
Personally, my opinion is that whatever policy is mandating 2.5" hard drives which are no longer being made is simply outdated and uninformed. Find some reputable 4TB/8TB 2.5" SATA SSDs with high endurance ratings and implement a backup requirement. Samsung, Intel, Micron… go with enterprise drives if desired.
The ST2000LM003 is a 5400RPM, 667GB/platter, 3 platter drive. Good luck finding them as NOS at any reasonable price.
Good luck finding them as NOS at any reasonable price
JACKPOT!
I happen to have a few sitting in a box, brand new and sealed, but I didn’t know if they were SMR or CMR, so I wasn’t going going to use them.
ST4000LM016
ST4000LM024
ST5000LM000
I think one of them is SMR the other two are CMR cant remember which is SMR if you want it that badly im sure you will work it out
They came out of seagate backup plus’s
Samsung M9T 2TB’s are also CMR (ST2000LM003) i have about 10 of them
Thinking about it, I think the Seagate manual stating Perpendicular is referencing the reserved CMR section that most SMR drives have. This makes sense since the manual states the ST5000LM000 has five platters. So it would be five, 1TB platters of which a portion is CMR.
This also makes sense of the manual listing ST5000LM024 as having either four or five platters. Either four, 1TB platters with reserve CMR sectors or five, 800 SMR platters without the reserve.
OMG, I thought the issue was solved, but that means the 2Tb LM0003 I have may indeed be SMR! I guess this means I’ll try to find some HGST Travelstar 7K1000…
The one in my hand is a 9.5mm ST2000LM003 branded Seagate, PN: HN-M201RAD/D1, rev A, F/W: 2BE10001, 5400 RPM, DP/N: 0TF52W, Made in China on July 2016 Site: DHT MSIP-REM-STX Momentus D
If you want more details, I can check the manufacturer data (hdparm, smart…) or benchmark (ex: with fio on Linux) - anything that doesn’t require putting the drive in the ZFS pool!
If you have other references (someone mentioned Toshiba), I’d be very interested.
There’s a bit of mystery around these drives.
TL;DR: It’s extremely hit and miss on which of these drives had (if ever) CMR/PMR platters. There seems to have been a time in the mid-2010s when Seagate was using Samsung technology in some of their drives. So finding which drives definitely did (if ever) had CMR/PMR platters is extremely difficult.
The Hard Drive Platter Database says the ST4000LM024 and ST5000LM000 are SMR.
BarraCuda (5526RPM, 128MB cache, SATA-600 interface, Advanced Format, Shingled Magnetic Recording, 15mm z-height)
ST4000LM024 4TB (4/8)*
ST5000LM000 5TB (5/10)
*Note: The manual suggests there may be 10-headed versions of this model floating around.
https://rml527.blogspot.com/2010/09/hdd-platter-database-seagate-25.html
And so does the the Seagate Datasheet dated May 2020
However, their Sep 2020 product manual says Perpendicular. Page 10
In addition, the blog states the ST4000LM016 uses 800GB platters.
800GB/platter Section (all drives under here use platters that can hold 800GB of data apiece.)
SpinPoint M10P / Seagate Laptop HDD (5400RPM, 128MB cache, SATA-600 interface, Advanced Format, Shingled Magnetic Recording, 15mm z-height)
ST3000LM016 3TB (4/8 [short-stroked])
ST4000LM016 4TB (5/10)
Note: The product manual lists multiple M/Ns per capacity, and isn’t forthcoming on the differences (besides encryption); only the “016” models, which appear the most common, are listed. Drive-managed SMR use in at least the ST4000LM016 (though I wouldn’t expect “shingles or not” to be a differentiating factor between the model numbers) is highly likely, given the eerily strong performance of randomized 4K writes in CrystalDiskMark 1000MB (a consistent behaviour of SMR HDDs across manufacturers), along with talk in data recovery forums of a “media cache”.
Note 2: As with the D8Xes and M9T(U)s, these came out sometime after the Seagate buyout, and the Samsung branding on the labels is fully replaced by Seagate’s in later batches.
https://rml527.blogspot.com/2010/09/hdd-platter-database-samsung-25.html
So while as a stretch it’s possible an 800GB CMR platter existed, since it’s ~17% more data than 667GB, it’s extremely unlikely a ~35% increase to 1TB CMR could have been achieved.
What may be the answer is from this 2016 review:
All the new BarraCuda 2.5” HDDs feature 128 MB of DRAM cache as well as multi-tier caching (MTC) technology, which is designed to hide peculiarities of SMR. Hard drives featuring shingled recording write new magnetic tracks that overlap part of the previously written tracks. This may slow down the writing process since the architecture requires HDDs to rewrite adjacent tracks after any writing operation. To “conceal” such peculiarities, Seagate does a number of tricks. Firstly, it organizes SMR tracks into bands in a bid to limit the amount of overwriting. Secondly, the MTC technology uses several bands of PMR tracks on the platters, around 1 GB of NAND flash cache as well as DRAM cache. When workloads generate relatively small amount of writes, the HDD writes data to NAND and/or to the PMR tracks at a predictable data rate. Then, during light workloads or idle time, the HDD transfers written data from the caches to SMR tracks, as described by Mark Re (CTO of Seagate) earlier this year.
they contained Seagate ST2000LM003 drives
I thought I hit the jackpot as I have a few, but I’ve just read in a reply below they ARE SMR as I suspected
HGST Travelstar 7K1000
I will look for them immediately
Personally, my opinion is that whatever policy is mandating 2.5" hard drives which are no longer being made is simply outdated and uninformed. Find some reputable 4TB/8TB 2.5" SATA SSDs with high endurance ratings and implement a backup requirement.
Some of these systems are left powered off for years, so requiring HDD next to NAND seems reasonable to mitigate the risks of data loss.
They don’t exist. SSD pricing at 2TB and smaller are basically on par with 2.5" hard drives now. 4TB drives are also dropping in price considerably.
While it should technically be possible to make 2.5" 4TB 9.5mm thick or 2TB 7mm thick CMR HDD’s, there’s no point in investing in the equipment to make them.
Consdering the three remaining HDD manufacturers (WD, Seagate, Toshiba) also make SSD’s, I would expect SATA SSD’s to completely phase out 2.5" HDD’s probably within the next year or two.
SSD pricing at 2TB and smaller are basically on par with 2.5" hard drives now. 4TB drives are also dropping in price considerably
Price is not a concern as long as the costs per drive do not require a special authorization process (>$500 per drive)
They don’t exist.
What about old drives like the Spinpoint M9T ST2000LM003 from Seagate? I have a few leftovers, but I don’t know if they are CMR or SMR.
I would expect SATA SSD’s to completely phase out 2.5" HDD’s probably within the next year or two.
The current plan is to keep things as-is for the next 2 to 3 years, so I will have to purchase a few spares this year.
This WD Blue is SMR.
You might be lucky to find some leftover 10k RPM SAS drives stock. Other than that, you’re late a few years. Expect to pay up a lot.
The only manufacturers left are WD/HGST, Seagate and Toshiba
There’s a couple of 1TB drives from Toshiba, but they’re hard to find and expensive.
The 2.5" Exos E are available in 1TB-2TB in SATA and 600-2.4TB in SAS. But AFAIK, they all require the additional 12V power like 3.5" drives. And it seems they’re both 15mm according to the specs:
As Sopel97 stated, the 1TB Blue is SMR. There was a 1TB WD Red NAS CMR drive, but it seems to be discontinued.
2TB CMR in a 9.5mm form isn’t possible because the largest 2.5" CMR platter is 600GB, so at least four 500GB platters would be required for 2TB.
Read here for more info about the platters in 2.5" and 3.5" drives.
Bottom line, your choices are Toshiba or old/used drives.
There’s a couple of 1TB drives from Toshiba, but they’re hard to find and expensive.
If they cost less than $500/drive, price will not be a problem
Would you have the reference or model number for these Toshibas?
There was a 1TB WD Red NAS CMR drive, but it seems to be discontinued.
Likewise, would you have the reference or a model number for the WD Red?
Read here for more info about the platters in 2.5" and 3.5" drives.
You may have forgotten a link?
due to data storage policies, it must NOT be a SSD but a spinning drive
due to the use of ZFS, it can’t be a SMR
Ditch the janky enclosure that requires obsolete technology and tell management that it isn’t 2003 anymore. The HDD manufacturers started exiting the 2.5" market a decade ago and attempting to support this dead tech is unsustainable. They don’t even make what you’re looking for anymore.