Shingled Magnetic Recordings (SMR)

Shingled drives are a new technology developed by Seagate aimed at improving data storage up to a whopping 8 terabyte at just about 3 cents a gigabyte. 

There has always been a trade off in physics with no exception here. While we are getting a huge amount of storage and reasonable prices, these drives are not very fast at speeds around 5,900 RPMS read/write which puts it right around 150MB/sec is considerably slow compared to the current SSD drive pushing 1,800MB/sec

Check out the video above for a more detailed illustration on how these drives work, but in a nutshell, they remove empty space on each platter in order to cram more data in

These drives are expected to ship in January for $260 for a 8 terabyte version. We will be installing a few of these drives within our Drobo 5n.  We are a little concerned with read/write speed. 

“The only way you fail is if you don’t try”