Slow SMR drives - beware

mrich

Just a word of caution, I picked up a new Seagate 8TB because the price was pretty good compared WD (I could get the 8TB Seagate for about the same as the 6TB WD), however once I started copying my data over to the new drive it became clear that something was amiss.  The transfer speed would reach about 100MB/s but then it would slow down to just a few MB/s and sometimes even 0MB/s and then it would catch up and then rise back up, rinse/repeat for every file.  I'm on about hour 22 right now copying my old 6TB drive over this new drive and it still says I have two hours left.  I looked the drive up and unfortunately it looks like I have purchased a SMR drive instead of a CMR drive, so buyer beware when looking into these drive and even some from WD that they are now shipping SMR drives but not mentioning it on the boxes.  I checked the Seagate box for any mention of SMR but found none.  Either way the drive is a major disappointment, especially that it's slower than my 4 year old 6TB WD drive.