We have just replaced our main PC (which Chris subsumed into her Home Office at the start of lockdown) with an amazingly tiny successor known as a NUC (Next Unit of Computing). Not only is this about the same size as a paperback book but is virtually silent, consumes next to no power, has more memory and is faster than the monolith it replaced, I built this a few years ago and it looked great at the time with see through side panels and an illuminated interior but now looks better suited as a museum exhibit.
Anyway, that is all waffle – as per, the real reason for this post is to remind myself to be careful when buying conventional hard disk drives in the future. Somehow the designers of Chris’s new m/c have found space inside for one of these disks (albeit the 2.5″ size normally used in laptops). This will be useful to back up the SSD drive but when I was just about to order one I was lucky enough to come across a review which pointed out that a lot of manufacturers are now starting to use a less than ideal design for their smaller drives known as SMR (shingled magnetic recording). This goes over my head but in essence it means you cannot defragment the drive like you can with the traditional PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) design.
I have only fairly recently bought a pair of relatively huge drives to use in a raided array to back up our photography as the 4k files generated by the drone and action camera can get very large. I am now going to find out what tech these disks use – fingers crossed …..
EDIT:
If anyone happens to read this and also as an aide memoire for me, here is the idiot’s guide.
In the olden days we had LMR disks until along came PMR. This offered R/W speeds that were 3 times higher. Then the subject of this post, SMR arrived but these proved not well suited for everyday computing tasks but were good for data backup and archiving. See this post for a better explanation ….