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Serious question: so basically wikipedia is the only use case?

tfigment 7y ago
Time series historian or some siem logging or similar journaling seem applicable to me. Maybe continuous loop video recording.
- samstave 7y ago
  Ah video makes sense. Thanks.
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
wikipedia is not a good use case.
klodolph 7y ago
You don’t need to write the entire drive sequentially with SMR, it’s just that you need to write sequentially within a given “chunk” of data. So there are some workloads that can, at least in theory, work on SMR. Think of object storage or log-structured data.
toast0 7y ago
With proper system design and tiered storage, it would fit a lot of archival uses if it's visible. Things like data warehousing, where you would want to store on something else for the current time period, but could store a big blob as the data gets finalized (once all nodes have reported in, or maybe after N days if you drop some columns at that time). Or household archival where data basically doesn't get changed once it's put on the storage --- wait for a block sized write to accumulate and then do it (need a different tier for the intermediate writes... Some SMR drives have a PMR section for this too). But, device managed SMR is not a very good solution, even if the use case would be good for SMR, because the filesystem is most likely not aware of the need to cluster writes.
Dylan16807 7y ago
Once the software problems are fixed, then just about anything you might want to put on a NAS is suitable for an SMR drive. Big files work just fine. Put all your big media files on it. Little files are fine in limited amounts, or in occasional bursts. You could install a program to it, but you wouldn't want to put your user folder on it. Don't put cache or temp files on it, or a database. Don't put a virtual machine's disk on it, since that implies an internal filesystem that doesn't know about the layout.

Time series historian or some siem logging or similar journaling seem applicable to me. Maybe continuous loop video recording.

samstave 7y ago
Ah video makes sense. Thanks.

eeZah7Ux 7y ago

wikipedia is not a good use case.

klodolph 7y ago

You don’t need to write the entire drive sequentially with SMR, it’s just that you need to write sequentially within a given “chunk” of data. So there are some workloads that can, at least in theory, work on SMR. Think of object storage or log-structured data.

toast0 7y ago

With proper system design and tiered storage, it would fit a lot of archival uses if it's visible. Things like data warehousing, where you would want to store on something else for the current time period, but could store a big blob as the data gets finalized (once all nodes have reported in, or maybe after N days if you drop some columns at that time). Or household archival where data basically doesn't get changed once it's put on the storage --- wait for a block sized write to accumulate and then do it (need a different tier for the intermediate writes... Some SMR drives have a PMR section for this too). But, device managed SMR is not a very good solution, even if the use case would be good for SMR, because the filesystem is most likely not aware of the need to cluster writes.

Dylan16807 7y ago

Once the software problems are fixed, then just about anything you might want to put on a NAS is suitable for an SMR drive. Big files work just fine. Put all your big media files on it. Little files are fine in limited amounts, or in occasional bursts. You could install a program to it, but you wouldn't want to put your user folder on it. Don't put cache or temp files on it, or a database. Don't put a virtual machine's disk on it, since that implies an internal filesystem that doesn't know about the layout.