SMR is bad, right? Ever wanted to see how bad? I run numerous performance tests on a desktop CMR drive and 5 SMR drives from Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba and find out that they all perform very differently. Find out the Good, the Bad and the Ferociously Ugly.

WD Blue, Seagate Barracuda and Toshiba P300 compared.

Affiliate link here to the CMR Drives – Check the links actually take you to the correct part numbers
WD20EARZ – 2TB: https://amzn.to/41bEjDz
WD40EZAX – 4TB: https://amzn.to/3AUhbyH
WD60EZAX – 6TB: https://amzn.to/3OvrVXd
WD80EZAX – 8TB: https://amzn.to/415VExB

Datasheets with the SMR and CMR part numbers here:

WD: https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-blue-hdd/product-brief-western-digital-wd-blue-pc-hdd.pdf
Seagate: https://www.seagate.com/content/dam/seagate/migrated-assets/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/3-5-barracudaDS1900-14-2007US-en_US.pdf
Toshiba: https://storage.toshiba.com/docs/support-docs/P300-SalesSheet_English_Web_r2.pdf

If you would like to, you can also support my work at : https://www.buymeacoffee.com/sometechguy – Always massively appreciated!

Other WD Blue SMR/CMR Comparison video https://youtu.be/rC0UDtCiYgI

0:00 Intro
2:16 Drives and testing overview
4:26 Overview of how SMR works compared to CMR
6:15 Testing and Analysis – Large File Writes
7:45 Testing and Analysis – Large File Reads
8:57 Analysis – Large Writes/Reads Avg MBps and Time to complete
9:45 Testing and Analysis – Mixed File Writes
10:50 Testing and Analysis – Mixed File Reads
11:35 Analysis – Mixed Writes/Reads Avg MBps and Time to complete
11:55 Testing and Analysis – Mixed File Non-Sequential Rewrites – make the SMR drives hurt
17:17 Pricing review of the tested drives
17:47 Conclusions

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