Shingled Magnetic Recording: Areal Density Increase Requires New Data Management

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is the next technology being deployed to increase areal density in hard disk drives (HDDs). The technology will provide the capacity growth spurt for the teens of the 21st century. SMR drives get that increased density by writing overlapping sectors, which means sectors cannot be written randomly without destroying the data in adjacent sectors. SMR drives can either maintain the current model for HDDs by performing data retention behind the scenes, or expose the underlying sector layout, so that file system developers can develop SMR-aware file systems.