Because physical limitations restrict the speed at which HDD platters can spin, HDDs do not have the high-speed throughput of an SSD. Read and write actions on an HDD depend on the spinning speed of platters, so they’re often used for storage where
As SMR technology causes a degradation on write performance, some new HDD with Hybrid SMR technology (making it possible to adjust the ratio of SMR part and CMR part dynamically) may have various characteristics under different SMR/CMR ratios.
Similarly, a random write reduces the throughput as the drive has to write the data onto different regions of the disk. This metric is distinct from the read and writes speed because disk tends to do worse on random access than sequential access.
Our HDD benchmarks hierarchy shows all of the high-capacity hard drives that we've tested over the years, ranked in order of overall sequential throughput.
