Purchasing non-SMR harddisks
Since it's been increasingly difficult to obtain non-SMR harddisks, I'd like to purchase some (maybe dozens, maybe even more) from dark market. What I need is an SATA to USB converter card that supports SMART, so I don't have to rely on eSATA. Every non-SMR disk is acceptable as long as it has no damaged sector (0x05 and 0xc5 parameters).
SMR harddisks are defectively designed and are unsuitable for practically any usage. Even if I want to store some bulk data that are rarely modified, I'd prefer 3.5-inch enterprise-class non-SMR disks (i.e. at the cost of portability). The additional storage space gained through SMR is only 25% compared with CMR, which doesn't even worth mentioning. The capacities of mainstream single-platter SMR harddisks are 500 GB (single sided) and 1 TB (double sided), so it is perfectly possible to manufacture 1 or 1.5 TB non SMR models (two platters, 3 or 4 sided). But since increased numbers of platters/heads mean increased costs (and reduced profits), the manufacturers want to produce SMR ones and force users to accept them.
Most of the disks will be given away in turn. I use them to share encrypted bulk data (and send the keys via secured channels).
Seagate has a page where they list whether each of their drives are CMR or SMR: https://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/cmr-smr-list/
Most of their more expensive 3.5 inch drives are CMR, while most of their cheaper 3.5 inch drives and all of their 2.5 inch drives are SMR.
We already have a whitelist (CMR) and a blacklist (SMR) for newly manufactured HDDs.
Seagate is the last brand to be considered by us, due to its high failure rate and poor performance (when compared to either HGST, WD or Toshiba). If you find that I purchase a Seagate disk from dark market, you have confidence that HGST, WD and Toshiba disks have been sold out in that dark market.
> We already have a whitelist (CMR) and a blacklist (SMR) for newly manufactured HDDs.
Great, could you share it with us?
Is there any way we can help you in your quest to find these hard drives?
Please tell your friends just not to throw away old harddisks, however slow and small they are.
(Magnetic) harddisks are ideal for archiving, and we routinely give away them to distribute data which are not suitable to be shared online.
WD 3.5 HDD
--CMR--
WD5000AZLX (500GB)
WD5000AZRZ (500GB)
WD10EZRZ (1TB)
WD10EZEX (1TB)
WD20EZRZ (2TB)
WD30EZRZ (3TB)
WD40EZRZ (4TB)
WD60EZRZ (6TB)
--SMR--
WD20EZAZ (2TB)
WD60EZAZ (6TB)