Are Seagate EXOS X14 HSMR drives TrueNAS ready?

TrueNAS General
,
1

Hi,

i am planning to buy new hard drives for my TrueNAS Scale (an old Workstation with Xeon 5687 cpu and 18 gigs of ram).

A great online shop (Ama…) sells Seagate EXOS X14 HSMR hard drives with an capacity of 12 tb for 170 euros (new, not refurbished or re-certified). So i am interested to buy 3 of these hard drives for my TrueNAS and build up a raid-z.

I know that the EXOS driver are loud but that’s not a problem on my side.
But i am a little bit confused because these drives are “hybdride SMR drives”. After searching a little bit i figured out the this means that the drives are factory shipped as CMR drives and can be reformatted with special tools to SMR drives to raise the capacity up a little bit: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-is-shipping-22tb-hdds.

I am not interested to re-format the drives to SMR, because i know that’s not an optimal feature set to use with raid/raid-z. I only want to know if it’s true tat they come as CMR drive.

Can someone help?

Thanks

StefanV3

1 Like
2

See also Redundancy drive ,

3

I think there was a misunderstanding in the post you linked @Protopia .
Those drives are HSMR (as hybrid SMR, so …hopefully… CMR by default), not HM-SMR (host managed) or HA-SMR (host aware).

4

An easy mistake to make.

As I understand it, HSMR drives are CMR by default and standard SATA, but you can reformat them as SMR (providing you have special drivers??)

HM-SMR are SMR but need special interfaces and drivers because the SMR part is done by the driver rather than firmware.

1 Like
5

My advice: Unless you’re 100% certain you can make these drives full CMR (and which which utility…), don’t even think about it.

6

In the Toms Hardware articles seagate mentiones that thf drives are CMR by default:

“Technically, such drives leave the factory as conventional magnetic recording (CMR) HDDs and the end-user formats them in accordance with its requirements. As a result, the size of CMR and SMR bands can vary from drive to drive.”

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-is-shipping-22tb-hdd

7

Please post the model number of the drives you intend to buy.

1 Like
8

This article is about 22 TB X20 drives, so not the same as those you intend to purchase.

9

st12000nm0558

10

Even Seagate’s own website does not return results for this model number. There is a '568 self-encrypting model, among others, but no '558. Which would be consistent with it being a model for hyperscalers that is not marketed towards the public.

Your best bet would be to ask Seagate technical support for the precise specifications and user manual.

1 Like
11

Should be CMR, although the serial is wrong. ST12000NM000 is the closest I could find… and Seagate’s Exos X series should be CMR-only.

I second contacting Seagate’s support.

12

I’ve seen a german seller that sells 2 drives with number …558 with a Qnap NAS https://store.ctn-systeme.de/schnaeppchen2/qnap-ts-264-8g-inkl-24tb-2x-12tb-seagate.html. That implicates to me that it should work even with True NAS…

But asking the seagate Support seems to be a good idea. Hopefully the Tell me the right Things.

Thanks

13

Hi,

i chatted with seagate support and they comfirmed the information i have:

The EXOS X14 12 TB hdd is a HSMR drive. Theses HSMR drives factory shipped with CMR (Conventional magnetic recording) and can be reformatted to use SMR (shingled magnetic recording) if it is needed. You need speciel software tools for that. So i think, with CMR (factory shipped) the drives should be working with TrueNAS.

Thnaks

StefanV3

6 Likes