Whereas NVMe SSDs tend to focus on getting faster, good old spinning hard drives are intent on getting larger. Tom's Hardware
reports that hard drive manufacturer Seagate announced on a recent earnings call that it is shipping huge 22TB hard drives to some of its customers. The company uses shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology to squeeze a couple more terabytes out of its biggest drives.
The highest-capacity drives most people can currently buy top out at 20TB; the Seagate Ironwolf Pro or WD Gold are two such drives, and they both generally retail for over $600. In its NAS drives, Seagate uses conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology, which provides better random read and write speeds than SMR disks but at a lower density—this is fine for archival storage but not so much for servers where multiple users are regularly accessing and modifying data. We found this out firsthand a few years back
when Western Digital covertly started using SMR technology in its WD Red drives for consumer NAS devices.
arstechnica.com
