Seagate: SMR-based HDDs are no good for a NAS

Recently, there was some controversy as it was discovered that Seagate, WD, and Toshiba had all slipped SMR-based HDDs into the regular desktop HDD market. These disks have a worse performance profile than traditional, non-SMR HDDs so a lot of folks aren't happy that the HDD makers are sneakily mixing these disks among their regular products.

ARS Technica reached out to Seagate and got to hear that the company will keep its NAS HDD product lineup SMR-free. While Seagate doesn't see an issue with SMR-based disks for regular desktop users, the company acknowledges that the technology has no place in a NAS.

Seagate only produces NAS drives that are CMR. We do not have any SMR drives in our IronWolf and IronWolf Pro drives, which are NAS solutions. As Jason mentioned in his email to you, we don't recommend SMR for NAS [...] I was just hoping that we could correct that, to make it a little more clear that Seagate is not producing NAS drives with SMR technology. [...] Seagate will always recommend the correct drive technology for the right application.