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Common Ground News

What is CMR SMR?

Author

Mia Phillips

Updated on February 16, 2026

What is CMR SMR?

Conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and shingled magnetic recording (SMR) are both recording technologies used by hard drives to physically record data using magnetic tracks.

Likewise, which is better for NAS CMR or SMR?

Users should evaluate their storage and backup needs carefully to determine the drives that work best for them. In principle, SMR drives will deliver the same capacity as CMR drives at a much lower cost per platter, but offer less usage flexibility.

Beside above, are SMR drives bad? They're slower than regular HDDs and they don't always play nice with PMR drives or other file systems. Random write performance on SMR drives is particularly bad, so if you have workloads that depend on it you absolutely don't want to run them on an SMR HDD.

People also ask, why SMR drives are bad?

It can get bogged down during large writes and become very very slow, like 10MB/s on average slow. Reads are fine it is only writing that is affected. That being said, the SMR technology does make this drive one of the best for $s/TB on the market, just don't expect amazing performance from it.

Is WD Blue CMR or SMR?

Western Digital released a statement showing which drives from their HDDs series use the slower SMR technology and which ones make use of the faster CMR technology. Drive series featuring SMR include the WD Red and WD Blue HDD series, both of which come in a 3.5" form factor.

Is CMR better for Nas?

CMR hard disks are a good choice when data is to be stored at high transfer rates or particularly large amounts of data. This includes a large number of activities from music streaming and image processing to use for NAS servers.

Can you mix SMR and CMR?

You should not mix CMR and SMR drives in the same RAID. But you can have two separate RAID on your Synology or Qnap NAS. If you can still find CMR drives on Amazon or eBay I would get them. Having a single RAID on a NAS gives more available storage space compared to several RAID groups.

Is WD Black CMR?

Western Digital Officially States Which Specific HDD Models Use SMR Technology. The company announced that the drives that use SMR technology range from WD Red HDD to WD Black HDDs. The other HDDs use the CMR recording technology that features a wider write head than a magnetic track.

How do I know if my hard drive is SMR or CMR?

The easiest way to detect whether it is a SMR drive is the cache size. Old drives (WDx0EFRX) had 64MB cache whereas new replaced drives (WDx0EFAX) feature 256MB. You can also read the serial number on the disk itself and compare it to a table bellow.

What is SMR?

SMR is an acronym for “Shingled Magnetic Recording,” an important technology utilized to increase capacity and enable lower cost per TB in hard disk drives. It is primarily used in HDDs that populate the world's largest cloud data centers. Every platter in a disk drive stores data in a track format.

What drives are SMR?

Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is a magnetic storage data recording technology used in hard disk drives (HDDs) to increase storage density and overall per-drive storage capacity.

What is the difference between PMR and SMR?

Hard Drive Recording Technologies

PMR: Perpendicular Magnetic Recording. With PMR data is written to and read from circular tracks on a spinning platter. SMR: Shingled Magnetic Recording. This type of drive overlaps recording tracks to store data at a lower cost than PMR technology.

Are SMR drives bad for gaming?

Since games are mostly static data, an SMR drive should be fine for games. SMR doesn't have any read penalties, it's only writing that's an issue if you fill up the CMR cache. Since you're probably limited by your internet connection download speed, poor write performance shouldn't be any issue either.

Does Western Digital use SMR?

We continue engaging customers and partners and analyzing real-world data to offer a family of WD Red NAS drives – from HDDs to SSDs – that serve all workloads and applications. Click here for SKUs to our client internal HDDs using SMR technology.

Is Seagate a SMR?

Some Seagate Barracuda Compute and Desktop disk drives use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology which can exhibit slow data write speeds.

Can a hard drive last 10 years?

—is that the average hard disk lasts somewhere between 3 and 5 years before it will fail and need to be replaced. Some will last beyond 10 years, but these are the outliers. When an HDD fails, it will not be repairable without great expense, and so the data stored upon it will very likely be lost forever.

Is WD40EFAX a SMR?

WD Red 4TB NAS Internal Hard Drive - 5400 RPM Class, SATA 6Gb/s, SMR, 256MB Cache, 3.5" - WD40EFAX.

Is WD gold CMR or SMR?

The WD Gold family are conventional magnetic recording (CMR) drive and previously topped out at 14TB.

Is WD purple SMR or CMR?

Both NAS (Network Attached Storage) drives—Seagate's Ironwolf Pro and Western Digital's Red Pro—are CMR drives and not the more performance-problematic SMR technology. Western Digital's announcement of the 18TB Purple did not mention either SMR or CMR at all, which we must assume means it is an SMR drive.

Is wd20ezbx a SMR?

all the new 2020 2tb WD Blues and standard Reds are now SMR.

Is wd80efax SMR or CMR?

List of WD CMR and SMR hard drives (HDD)
ModelSeriesType
WD80EFAX WD80EFZXRedCMR
WD100EFAXRedCMR
WD101EFAXRedCMR
WD120EFAXRedCMR

Is wd80efax a CMR?

But you never know if they may say, yes some wd80efax are CMR and some are SMR, so it is not wrong to say wd80efax is CMR In this age

Is st2000dm008 a SMR?

The 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB drives are all SMR, which means they are slow for random writes and not suitable as boot drives.