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:

If you know about other options, could you please list them?

  • greggie62@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    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  Personally, my opinion is that whatever policy is mandating 2.5" hard drives which are no longer being made is simply outdated and uninformed.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.

    • csdvrx@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      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  Personally, my opinion is that whatever policy is mandating 2.5" hard drives which are no longer being made is simply outdated and uninformed.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.

      • csdvrx@alien.topOPBEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        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.

      • Shonk_@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        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

        • Far_Marsupial6303@alien.topBEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          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.

          • csdvrx@alien.topOPBEnglish
            1·
            11 months ago

            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.

        • Far_Marsupial6303@alien.topBEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          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

          https://www.seagate.com/content/dam/seagate/migrated-assets/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/barracuda-2-5-DS1907-3-2005US-en_US.pdf

          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.

          https://www.anandtech.com/show/10757/seagate-introduces-barracuda-25-mobile-hard-drives-with-up-to-5-tb-capacity