O/T: Win7 m.2 2280 clone to hdd.

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Paul
writes:
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

Is there any way to tell whether a drive is a (firmware-based) one
of this type, so as to be able to avoid them?

Using "shingled" or "SMR" is for public relations
purposes a poisoned descriptor.

You're not likely to find an admission of which
ones are shingled.
[]
)-:

Is my "HGST HTS541010B7E610 (1000G)" (really 931 GiB of course), bought
over the counter a few months ago, of that type? Can I tell from any
part of that number?

Let's try a little experiment.

I think WDC owns HGST now. HGST used to be IBM Research.

This is your drive, with the 19 and 21 dbA acoustic properties.

https://www.hgst.com/sites/default/f..._datasheet.pdf

Compare to the middle column here.

https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/...879-771437.pdf

I think it's the same drive.

Notice that only the middle drive has a 128MB cache.
The others have 8MB and 16MB cache (likely older
controller boards).

Only the slimmest drive got the big cache.

Makes you wonder... Hmmm.

*******

The exercise requires a *lot* of supposition.

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads...tters.2525313/

Even if the idiots told us how many platters, that would
help. They don't even give areal density with regularity.
There's just not enough data to work it out - my data
comparison method is no damn good, unless you can trace
down the release date on each drive on Page 2. A drive
design could have a really small cache, if it was released
ten years ago. More than a little weird, as modern memory
chips are huge, and you'd probably have to pay a premium
to get some crusty old 8MB chip. One of the consequences
of buying a small chip like that, is the bandwidth might
not be that high either.

Paul