I still remember when higher capacity hard drives meant that the lower capacity hard drives got cheaper. What a time to be alive!

Title: "20TB drives with SMR from Seagate coming in the next few months" Quote from Seagate: "We expect to begin shipping 20 terabyte PMR drives in the second half of this calendar year." Are these different drives, or is the title wrong and this is about PMR/CMR drives?

I had a displeasure of experiencing how unusably bad Shingled drives are, I wouldn't go anywhere near these garbage. At best they are like using a rewritable CD as if it was an HDD.

LimitbreakOr:

I had a displeasure of experiencing how unusably bad Shingled drives are, I wouldn't go anywhere near these garbage. At best they are like using a rewritable CD as if it was an HDD.

Using SMR here on an small-sized (2.5") large capacity (5TB) external USB 3.0 drive for using Hyper Backup on my NAS. For this use-case they are fairly capable, and there are no 2.5" drives that are large capacity (5TB or more) that are not SMR as far as I know, so there is actually no alternative other than to go to extremely expensive SSD, or to change to a bigger form factor. But anyway... any workload slightly more complicated than that and... yup, wouldn't even think of using SMR!

heffeque:

But anyway... any workload slightly more complicated than that and... yup, wouldn't even think of using SMR!

Yeah, that would be one of the very rare and unique situations where SMR isn't completely useless although CMR would still be preferable.