This a reasonable deal for a CMR hdd, with free shipping for Mel, Syd, Can and Bris.
NB this is the WD40EZRZ model that uses CMR, not the WD40EZAZ ($129 @ centrecom) which uses SMR technology. I am no expert, but CMR is preferable to SMR for some applications from what I have read.
Also available at Pcbyte without free shipping, and limited supplies for $125 at msy.
Better off getting an external hardrive.
…if you can reliably find an external hard drive that is CMR not SMR, yes. For just bulk storage, this may not mean anything to some, but I'd greatly prefer CMR
Really for a PS5?
I was under the impression the 256MB cache of the SMR was more valuable than the CMR due to the way the ps5 can stream textures from disk?
Been a while since i looked into it though; but I thought the 'large' write cache kept the read heads less busy (until free time shows up); since SMR only affects READ speeds minimally if at all.
@MasterScythe: The 256MB cache will keep the PS5 fed for 1 or 2 seconds. So the heads will still be busy. I'd use HDDs for archive or lower bandwidth applications (videos etc). For high bandwidth or high seek applications such as streaming textures, gaming etc, I'd go for an SSD instead. Even a SATA SSD in an external USB case.
The 256MB cache will keep the PS5 fed for 1 or 2 seconds.
The PS5 is able to reliably write 256MBps over USB!? Good lord that's impressive.
I'm more of an enterprise server guy, it's surprising that consoles have been able to so significantly beat-out ten thousand dollar server infrsstructure.
Go Sony!
What's NOT impressive, is that they're so poorly coded that a game needs to do that much writing per second though.
Going back to, say, the XBOX-One or the PS4, it only saw tens of megabytes per minute in things like logs, and save files and such.
Someone in their coding team got lazy with storage access.
Even a modern SSD will reach it's MTBF writes in months, with 256MBps being written; planned obsolescence to sell more drives perhaps?
Or just bad coders, and Sony aren't secretly evil, haha.
Neither will let you load ps5 games directly but a CMR drive should be fine for loading PS4 games or for temporarily storing ps5 games. I wouldn't trust SMR to provide a good gaming experience loading anything, although in theory read speeds are unaffected by the smr-ness. A lot of games do weird caching stuff and write stuff back to the HDD and that essentially doesn't work properly when it's too slow.
As above; I was under the impression SMR's large cache benefited emulation and (already downloaded) games.
It would be rare for a ps4 game to write more than 256MB every minute, wouldnt it? (The speed at which smr can typically flush its buffer without write penalty): do ps4 typically write 1GB per 4 minutes playing?
I mainly build NeoGeo and SNK machines, where the CD is expected to be "read always" and the memory cartridge is the write location; smr helps with emulating this (well, the smr specifically doesnt, the huge write cache does) not the same with modern consoles?
I used to use firecuda drives before they became harder to get.
On average? Definitely not. Long enough to get unhappy? Yes, sometimes, I'd wager. Especially with how large some games have gotten. I don't know what effect SMR really has on a ps5 loading PS4 games, this is largely speculation based on plenty of games doing stupid stuff like writing a bunch of data for the purposes of caching.
Hi! I looked into it further. Sony actually indirectly sells an official Game Drive hard drive from Seagate, and it apparently is SMR, so there shouldn't be any issues using it for PS4 games.
tl;dr SMR/shingled drives are FINE for the PS4/PS5!
Is this any good for a NAS?
Honestly, no. You'd be better off getting the 8TB Ironwolf (at $289) that I posted yesterday. The WD Blue range is a standard desktop design that is not suited to 24/7 operation within a NAS.
Thank you, I appreciate the advice.
8 of them going strong in a RaidZ2 for a few years.
And 6x 3TB of the same, about 6yrs 24/7 on.
Just be sure to run wdidle and turn the sleep timer from 8 seconds to 300 (or 0/off, if you wish)
Can anyone please guide if I can use this as external memoney (eSATA) for Reolink NVR?
Absolutely can. So long as its new enough to not have the old 2.2TB limit on drive addressing.
If its newer than 10 years, you should be golden.
Thanks Mate
Which one is suitable for ps5