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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2020-07-12, 15:22

According to this table, WD Black in the 2.5" form factor uses SMR, though it only mentions 1TB, not this 2/4/5TB version. SMR means it's probably only going to be good for general-purpose storage and even then only if you don't expect to actually fill the disk. SMR drives get dramatically slower as available space shrinks. Modern games benefit greatly from residing on fast drives like SSDs because there are so many assets that have to be loaded and reloaded during gameplay.

FWIW, Western Digital has been the target of great ire from storage enthusiasts and enterprise customers for sneaking poor-performing SMR drives into their supposedly-professional "Red" line of NAS drives. They're also being sued for this deception, though that class action lawsuit is still in progress, AFAICT. Some people are effectively boycotting WD drives and advocating the competing Seagate drives.

I couldn't find any claims about CMR vs SMR on the linked product page for this particular Black drive. Some larger capacity drives are still using CMR. Maybe it's okay, but I would be suspicious that they're hiding SMR in there unless I did some more research.

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