I have a choice between two Toshiba HDDs: MG09ACA18TE and MG07ACA14TE. According to this datasheet, the first one is a 18TB Helium MAMR drive and the second is a 14TB Helium CMR drive.
The 18TB translates to a better $/TB where I live, which is the main reason why I was leaning towards it. Also, Toshiba claims that MAMR technology “has been tried and tested for many years”.
Do you have any knowledge of or experience with MAMR? Is MAMR technology likely to be as reliable as CMR? Or should I get the CMR drive instead?
Thanks
There is no need to use MAMR for anything up to 24TB, because CMR is possible for those sizes. For 18TB, I would use and have used CMR for years, I have tons of 18TB CMR drives in use.
There are 24TB drives incoming ( https://www.seagate.com/content/dam/seagate/en/content-fragments/products/datasheets/exos-x24/exos-x24-DS2080-2307US-en_US.pdf ), everything below that is available. Only above 24TB MAMR or HAMR will probably be necessary, with 28 TB SMR drives on the horizon.
Backblaze has always been pretty up front about what they use and how long they last. Here is an old article from 2018 and the upshot of using them for 5 years then is there seems to be little to no difference as to failure rates. With numbers. More drives than you will ever own. I’d go with their analysis.
Yeah, I read their report from Q3 2022. However, the problem is that they don’t use any MAMR drives, which is a new technology, so that doesn’t help me.
The helium aspect is what i was focused on. My bad.
That said, the HAMR vs MAMR thing I see as being sorted for the most part as the release of these types of drives to the enterprise market gives me assurance as to the durability of them. "new’ only in that the drives have been somewhat recently come into the consumer arena.
These drives have been on the market since early 2021, sure they’re still kind of new but with 5 years warranty (and they decided since recently to actually offer warranty to consumers in Europe too) shouldn’t be that much of a risk.
It’s unlikely any long term failure would be known this soon. Which is why you don’t see stats.
There’s nothing like the SanDisk SSD failure debacle, at least, known in the community.