crystaldiskinfo not showing total host writes

Toshiba SMR MC Example F6Īs a mitigation against this penalty, writes can be cached to a segment of the drive that operates with CMR technology, and during idle time the drive will spool those writes out to the SMR area. This forces the data on the overlapping tracks to be rewritten during the process, which takes extra time to perform. When data is written on a SMR drive the data on the overlapping tracks will be affected by the write process as well. The overlapping arrangement of SMR tracks complicates drive operations when it comes time to write data to the disk. The WD Red is a device-managed SMR drive, which presents itself to the operating system as a normal hard drive. Because of this overlap, the resulting tracks are thinner allowing more to fit into a given area and achieving better overall data density.

It is called shingled because the data tracks can be visualized like roofing shingles they partially overlap each other. The newer contender is SMR, or shingled magnetic recording. Data is written on magnetic tracks that are side-by-side, do not overlap, and write operations on one track do not affect its neighbors. This has been the standard technology behind hard drive data storage since the mid-2000s. Many of our readers may already be familiar with the differences between SMR and CMR, but a quick refresher never hurt anyone!įirst up is CMR, which stands for conventional magnetic recording. Feel free to listen along while you read. While our YouTube presence is still small compared to the STH main site, we thought this was an important enough finding that we should try reading those who may be impacted. With this piece, we have a companion video: To that end, today we will be comparing a WD Red 4TB SMR drive to its CMR predecessor, as well as CMR drives from other manufacturers.

We can hypothesize that there is a negative impact, but it is better to show it. With all the recent controversy regarding WD, Toshiba, and Seagate slipping SMR drives into retail channels and failing to disclose the use of their slower technology, we thought it would be interesting to dive into the actual impact of using a SMR drive.

Crystaldiskinfo not showing total host writes