Hi,
I just wanted to share my experience with a new SMR HDD drive from Seagate (ST2000LM015). I did not know that a new recording system had emerged (shingled magnetic recording), and after a few days investigating, it seems that the HDD manufacturers are “hiding” their new characteristics for a good reason: it has worse write performance than previous generations. I have not yet hit that performance drop because I have just started filling the drive, but it is supposed to become worse with writes and deletes (like in early days SSDs). However, I also want to confirm that the HDD supports TRIM (yes, it does!!). There is a lot of misinformation about this in the Internet. When TRIM is forced in Windows 10 PowerShell by this command (Optimize-Volume -DriveLetter D -ReTrim -Verbose), the HDD does some housekeeping process internally that takes a bit more time than in an SSD. If the trimming the drive will keep it fast for its life is something that I still do not know. There are no proper benchmarks of these kinds of drives and their performance drop over time.
I have to say that if I had knew about this technology I would not have bought the drive, but to be fair, there are no 2TB 2.5 inch HDDS in 7 mm format that are not SMR (even not 9.5 mm a.f.a.i.k.). My primary drive is an SSD, and the HDD is just a secondary drive for data storage, so I do not need the performance a lot, but I tend to copy and erase very big files in the secondary drive. If that operation becomes slow over time due to the multiple rewrites the SMR technology needs, I have completely messed by buying this drive!
Do you have any experience in long term use with this technology of HDDs?