Large capacity portable hard drives have reached a plateau. There’s not much hardware improvement that can be made as there is little to no incentive to invest in R&D. New technologies like HAMR or Helium are reserved for more lucrative markets like data centers where the need for smaller 2.5-inch hard disk drives is, well, non-existent. SMR allows vendors to offer higher capacity without the need to fundamentally change the underlying recording technology.

Ironically, the barebones 5TB drive is up to 50% more expensive than the external model, despite having fewer materials (no cable, chassis or electronics); the laws of supply and demand at work. WD platter sizes 2.5 niche products: https://rml527.blogspot.com/2010/10/hdd-platter-database-western-digital-25_2393.html

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Experience the highest capacity, and the thinnest 2.5-inch hard drive you've ever seen. Choose from 500 GB to 2 TB of massive storage for all of your application and data needs along with a slim 7 mm form factor drive that makes system upgrades very easy.

Our Database profile again showed the Seagate Gen3 as a strong runner-up to the Gen2 plateauing at 64 IOPS, steady to 128. The next profile looks at a file server, with 80% read and 20% write workload spread out over multiple transfer sizes ranging from 512-byte to 64KB. Toshiba platter sizes 2.5": https://rml527.blogspot.com/2010/09/hdd-platter-database-toshiba-25.html Host Aware, HA-SMR, which is designed to give ZFS insight into the SMR process. Note that ZFS code to use HA-SMR does not appear to exist. Without that code, a HA-SMR drive behaves like a DM-SMR drive where ZFS is concerned.The portable bus-powered external hard drive market is served by all three HDD vendors - Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. Seagate has been making use of SMR in the recent past for this segment. Western Digital is known for being coy about divulging the technology used inside its consumer products. It turns out that WD has also been using SMR technology since last 2016 in its external hard drives. In response to our specific query, WD officially confirmed the use of SMR platters in the hard drive inside the WD My Passport 5TB 2019 edition.

To a large extent, Seagate’s multi-tier cache determines the performance of the company’s BarraCuda 2.5" and Mobile HDD drives. For example, when Seagate announced its Mobile HDD products earlier this year, the company declared maximum sustainable transfer rate of the HDD at 100 MB/s. However, the documentation was altered later in the summer to reflect a maximum transfer rate of 140 MB/s (possibly due to updated firmware, or a change in the performance measurement method). Now, the high-capacity BarraCuda 2.5” (3 TB, 4 TB and 5 TB) drives are rated for 130 MB/s, while the mainstream BarraCuda 2.5” (500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB) are rated for 140 MB/s. This is still below the 145 – 169 MB/s offered by PMR-based Laptop HDDs from the company. Seagate BarraCuda 2.5" HDDs Rounding out the figures, in our Workstation profile, the Gen3 placed a solid second, again to the Gen2. The Gen3 plateaued at 64 IOPS and had a minor decrease at 128 IOPS. Seagate’s third generation SSHDs (solid state hybrid drives), now for both laptops and desktops, are marketed as a replacement for HDDs and serve as a good option for those otherwise considering an SSD. SSHDs aim to offer users the price-point and robust capacity of HDDs while also utilizing NAND flash to provide the performance attained with SSDs by caching critical applications. Slimmed from 9.5mm to 7mm, our review model third generation Seagate 500GB SSHD Thin with 8GB of MLC NAND would fit well in any user configuration and is especially well-suited for ultra-thin, ultra-light laptops. All 2-6TB external drives - Elements, My Book, Easystore, etc. Precise models vary and are not guaranteed; assume SMR in capacities below 8TB.In the 4K Random Transfers MB/s, the Seagate Gen3 again ranked second behind the Gen2, with the Gen3 at 0.496MB/s and 0.896 MB/s. The Seagate Gen3 also ranked high above most of the competition at 127.1 IOPS read and 229.4 IOPS write, but first place was snatched up by the Seagate Gen2.

The new SSHD Gen3 line also gets a naming convention update. The first generation hybrids were called Momentus XT, while the second generation models were called Momentus XT with Fast Factor. Now, Seagate has dropped Momentus family branding altogether, opting instead for the simpler category name of SSHD. To help clarify drive generations, StorageReview will reference the drives on a go-forward basis with the SSHD generation number to help clarify the chronology for consumers (Gen1, Gen2, Gen3). Seagate has formally introduced a new family of hard drives in the 2.5” form-factor. It is designed for laptops as well as external storage solutions. The new BarraCuda HDDs are based on 1 TB shingled magnetic recording platters and Seagate’s multi-tier caching technology. They enhance the maximum capacity of the company’s 2.5” HDDs to 5 TB - making the BarraCudaST5000LM000 the world’s highest-capacity 2.5” hard drive.The SSHD serves to satiate the demand of users looking to couple performance gains and storage capacity without breaking the bank – think gamers and media enthusiasts. However, SSHD technology is not a cure-all, which Seagate readily admits; users craving extreme performance will likely desire more than an SSHD provides. Yet, for the market of HDD users Seagate is focused on, the Seagate SSHDs offer users improved performance at a lower price than SSDs. Along with the change in nomenclature, Seagate implemented several platform changes to the SSHD Gen3 as well. While Gen2 provided users with 8GB SLC NAND, the Gen3 switched to 8GB MLC NAND. This modification does sacrifice some endurance, but the majority of users won’t deplete the endurance for the lifetime of the drive’s warranty making it mostly a non-issue. By switching to MLC NAND, Seagate is also able to reduce the Gen3 production cost greatly and thus lower the price significantly. Seagate has also decided to streamline their laptop drive production by exclusively offering 5,400 RPM drives. So while the Gen2 had a 7,200 RPM drive, the Gen3 spins at 5,400 RPM. Thanks to improvements in the cache technology, the cache miss pain of hitting the slower spinning drive should be mitigated, but regardless, hitting the drive without flash assistance is going to hurt a little more than in the Gen2 drive.