Review on Toshiba MQ04ABD200 2.5" Laptop Hard Drive - 2TB, 5400RPM, 9.5mm Thickness by John Hill

SHINGLES? The industry usually comes up with new tricks to beat physics and make things more surprising, but the latest trick has some implications that users should be aware of. , the official name of SMR. In short, it uses a different read/write track width and partially overwrites the old data, but after that it can still read it. Pretty amazing stuff. BUT. The downside is that writes are typically very slow. To counteract this effect the drive has a very large cache which is very helpful but makes the process completely unpredictable. Copying movie files onto the drive I saw transfer rates of 175MB/s only allowed at 12MB/ s. Well, for "heavy office" workloads this might be a good drive (the cache eats the xls at top speed) but anyone copying or creating large amounts of data will have their hair pulled out! Definitely don't use this when editing video files. SO THEN? This drive (and others, say Seagate of similar capacity) has so much storage space but such a slow write speed for large files that it's probably best used as a backup drive or primarily read-only, e.g. B. for music is used. Server. With the advent of cheap SSDs, these SMR drives are increasingly viewed as a niche product. I love this drive and use it to back up my work, but wouldn't choose it for primary storage.