QLC is complete trash and should never be used outside of a WORM architecture in a larger pool. That they are trying to force it on consumers is criminal. Same with SMR.
Not everyone is a creator editing/rendering 4k videos. For the typical surfer/office worker/gamer QLC drives are fine because they rarely need to dump 50+GB of writes at a time. What you're suggesting is basically "ban all atom processors because they're criminally slow!"
So consumer SSDs now depend on a limited dynamic part of flash being used as SLC to cache writes. Just that this dynamic part mostly gets smaller the fuller the device is.
And as soon as you do anything with large writes you will hit a brick wall of slowness, on full devices sooner then on empty ones.
And I bet the vast majority of people basically never do >10GB writes at >200MB/s.
But the information about the limited write cache never gets mentioned by the manufacturers. So people that actually need to write large amounts of data from time to time, fall into a performance trap.
Only device managed SMR is terrible. Host managed SMR is fine for data-hording if the savings in size/price are forwarded.
Exactly. When you architect your tiered data storage solution to take advantage of technologies such as SMR/QLC it works great. This is absolutely not the case in consumer applications. Consumers will use QLC for their boot drives and fill their NAS boxes with SMR drives and have a horrible experience.
I'll believe it when I see it, though.
Unless you're trying to cram more data into a 2.5 inch drive, there seems to be zero upside to getting an SMR drive. They're priced about the same per byte despite "25% density improvements", and the high capacity 3.5 inch models on the market don't use it.
Sure they do. WD sold device managed SMR 3.5 disks without telling anyone. And then people noticed because of absolutely terrible raid re-silvering performance.
The consumer market is absolute trash for SMR devices, all the disadvantages with no benefit. But you can be sure that the enterprise sector gets host managed SMR drives at a better size/price ratio.
The biggest SMR drives I can buy are 6TB or 8TB.
The biggest non-SMR drive I can buy is 18TB.
https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...
And yeah that's why I said on the market rather than 'in existence'.