Review on Seagate 1TB Mobile HDD SATA 6Gb/s 128MB Cache 2.5": Internal Bare Drive (ST1000LM035) - Reliable Storage Solution for Enhanced Performance by Adam Walendzik ᠌

I'm not sure if it's worthwhile to call out a negative, especially considering that, as of late, manufacturers have been transitioning all of their reasonably affordable product lines to this technology; but, you should be aware of what you are purchasing before making a purchase. The SMR technology is not suited for the task of writing individual pieces of data to a variety of locations. When you write a small amount of data, you are essentially overwriting a larger amount of data that is several megabytes in size. In normal operation, this is undetectable because of the designated region that does not use SMR. The disk controller writes to this area and then transfers it when it has free time; however, when there is a heavy load that uses random recording, this area can become overflowing, and the speed can drop by several times or even tens of times. Downloading content using a protocol known as bittorrent is an illustration of this kind of load. Following a brief amount of work, the performance will plummet to less than 5 megabytes per second, and all additional disk access, including reading, will become unresponsive for a few seconds.