I am looking at suitable internal HDs for a ROCK to hold music files. Will an SMR HD work or is a PMR HD mandatory? The only (9.5mm) PMR HDs that will fit inside a NUC are 2TB:
Samsung Spinpoint M9T 2TB ST2000LM003/4/6
Seagate 2TB STBD2000102
which seem to be identical. 9.5mm height Disks >2TB only come in SMR, which I have read is considered unsuitable for music playback. Roon KB does not differentiate between SMR and PMR
Does anyone have any experience with SMR vs. PMR in the context of ROCK?
There is a 4TB 15mm PMR high disk, the Samsung Spinpoint M10P 4TB ST4000LM016, which I guess could be used in a USB enclosure.
@Simon_Arnold3
See here for the difference between PMR and SMR. SMR HDs are much slower than PMR, because they need to rewrite tracks several times during writing.
thanks, @danny and @ged_hickman1 for the clarification
My 2.5" SMR drives write at around 50MB/s whereas the PMR ones write at around 120MB/s, which makes quite a difference if you want to transfer 2TB of music files to the drive. That was the reason for my question.
Iâll stick with PMR, such as the Toshiba L200, which seems readily available.
Sounds to me like you are asking me to justify why I would buy a PMR drive with better write performance over an SMR, when both types are readily available. Any reason I should take the SMR instead?
Iâm not sure anyone is telling you to buy one or the other; rather saying that the drive in normal everyday use will be doing mainly reads so write performance, apart from initially populating the disk, is a bit of a red herring.
If you are selecting a disk then go for one with the best read performance to act as the music library.
I think youâre right. Putting a drive into the NUC brings all sorts of constraints, regardless of technology (backup being one of them). Probably using a small NAS such as Synologyâs DS218j would be the best overall solution. Would also allow to use the more elegant thin NUC model.
No, no, I wouldnât want you to justify anything - was just pointing out that the technology wasnât something you should worry about (beyond MTBFs, obviously, but even thatâs a little bit academic as long as you have a 2nd copy somewhere).
NASs add latency, and, generally, Roon would rather you donât use a NAS.
If youâre going to do mirroring, and want something silent, OWC makes a nice 2,5" dual enclosure that you can connect straight to your NUC over USB (regular usb, not usb-c).
(Relative) silence + it should work without external power is why you might want the 2,5" version.
Youâd (obviously) still need to back that up, though.
ROCK and music on NUC7i5 (NVME M.2 & 2TB 2,5â HDD)
\rock\Data\Storage\InternalStorage mounted on DS718+ NAS (RAID1)
Nightly rsync on NAS between mounted ROCK share and /music
Nightly backup of NAS to 4TB external USB3 drive
Nightly sync of music and user folders to cloud (BackBlaze B2)
No reason this could no also be done with an external disk attached to the ROCK/NUC. I may have overdone it a bit in the backup part â kindly adjust to your comfort level.
