Western Digital recently announced new data center HDDs that increase Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) capacity to 32TB and Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) capacity to 26TB. The company...
You’ve made me uncertain if I’ve somehow never noticed this before, so I gave it a shot. I’ve been dd-ing /dev/random onto one of those drives for the last 20 minutes and the transfer rate has only dropped by about 4MB/s since I started, which is about the kind of slowdown I would expect as the drive head gets closer to the center of the platter.
When the cache isn’t full, yes, that’s true. Copy a file that’s significantly bigger than cache and performance will drop part way through.
You’ve made me uncertain if I’ve somehow never noticed this before, so I gave it a shot. I’ve been
dd-ing/dev/randomonto one of those drives for the last 20 minutes and the transfer rate has only dropped by about 4MB/s since I started, which is about the kind of slowdown I would expect as the drive head gets closer to the center of the platter.