What is SMR Technology?

Description

SMR(Shingled Magnetic Recording) is overwriting part of the previously written track analogous to the shingling of a roof.
CMR and SMR each have their Pros and Cons.

CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording)
CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording)
  • Pros
    Can directly re-write data into previously written sector
  • Cons
    Use of discrete tracks limits the rate at which areal density increases can be achieved
SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording)
SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording)
  • Pros
    More efficient use of recording surface area achieves higher data capacity compared to CMR
  • Cons
    Because the tracks are overlapping, re-writes directly into previously written sectors are no longer possible.  The recovery of  space containing outdated data may affect performance.  

How Toshiba SMR helps to maintain random write performance

Toshiba’s innovative Media Cache design, allows the hard drive to efficiently process randomly written data updates to previously written data sets. 
New data is temporarily written from DRAM Buffer to the Media Cache.
After merging old data and new data, the revised data is written sequentially to another SMR BAND.
This helps to avoid a decrease in performance when re-writing data, which was previously a downside to SMR. 

SMR random writing manner
SMR random writing manner

What is the result of the solution?

PCMark® is an industry standard PC benchmark tool to test the performance of a PC at the system and component level. DT02 Series (SMR 5,400rpm) achieved a higher performance result than Competitor A’s (SMR 7,200rpm).

PCMark<sup>®</sup> Vantage Score
PCMark® Vantage Score
PCMark<sup>®</sup> Component Performance Score
PCMark® Component Performance Score

PC ENVIRONMENT:
Tool: PCMark® Vantage
System: GIGABYTE H97-GAMING 3 (Intel CoreTM i5-4460 3.20GHz/ 8GBRAM)
Drivers: Intel Desktop/Workstation/Server Express Chipset SATA AHCI Controller v. 12.8.0.1016
OS:  Windows 10 v1903 x64

Lineup

Below products adopt SMR technology.

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