Martin Gregorie  wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Dec 2020 23:51:30 +0000, bob prohaska wrote:
>
>> It remains  fairly difficult if I want a 2.5" drive rather than 3.5".
>> Is there some special  trick for finding them? By pure luck I found
>> this:
>> https://www.toshiba-storage.com/products/toshiba-internal-hard-drives-
> l200/
>>
>> which reports that these drives use CMR:
>> HDWJ110UZSVA,
>> HDWK105UZSVA,
>> HDWJ105UZSVA
>>
> From the stuff you posted it appears that all WD 2.5" 500GB Blue and
> Black drives and 1GB Red drives are CMR.
>
Indeed, there do exist refurbs and old stock at 500 GB. Some of the new
old stock is priced extravagantly, with neither reviews nor sales. No
current, mainline products with clear specification that I can find.

> Similarly all WD 3.5" drives of 1TB or smaller are CMR and so are larger
> Red Pro, Black and Purple.
>
It does appear that the best way to avoid SMR is to opt for 3.5" drives.
Both selection and documentation are much better. It rather blows my
"low power" goal out of the water, but I'm a niche buyer.

> That is for drives made in the first part of 2020 - after that its
> anybody's guess

The trend to SMR is rather clear. I'd like to learn how to live with
it, on the assumption that it's unavoidable for small, low power disks.
It seems likely that documentation will improve as more people care.
Perhaps SMR and CMR will become checkboxes on Amazon's product search 8-)

Most of my concern over SMR was related to use as a swap device. With
the advent of the 8GB Pi4 the swap issue seems to be gone. If TRIM
can be made to work with an SMR mechanical disk there might not be a
problem at all.

Thanks to all for reading and replying!

bob prohaska

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