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I am annoyed that they missed an opportunity here to fix SMR support in the non-GooFaceAmaSoft DC ecosystem. Announce a trade-in for anyone who has a Red and h
by kijiki 6y ago
I am annoyed that they missed an opportunity here to fix SMR support in the non-GooFaceAmaSoft DC ecosystem.
Announce a trade-in for anyone who has a Red and has a problem with device-managed SMR, with a CMR Red. Many, many people won't notice or care (RAID1 users who don't do massive writes) Then reflash the SMR reds with the host-managed firmware they already have for the megascalers (who of course have their own highly proprietary software management layers to handle SMR) and sell those at some deep discount to anyone who wants them.
Announce a $100,000 bounty to anyone who adds host-managed SMR support (with some slightly ambitious perf target vs CMR) to ZFS, bcachefs, whatever.
They come out of this looking good (eventually) instead of looking like complete assholes. And end up with an expanded ecosystem that allows them to create a new product family using firmware work that they've already done years go!
- StillBored 6y agoDrive managed SMR is borderline. Host managed is stupid and only worth the effort if your a hyperscaler with a particular workload. A workload that happens to look a lot like old school tape workloads, which is probably what they should have sold SMR as.. Hard drives that look like tapes. Which is why beyond some basic hinting its not worth putting in mainstream filesystems.
- kijiki 6y ago> Hard drives that look like tapes. Tapes don't have fast (by spinning rust standards) random reads. Hinting in ext4 or NTFS is of course a waste of time, but CoW filesystems like ZFS or btrfs are in a much better position to handle host-managed SMR. And a generic "SMRTL" layer that utilizes (hopefully mirrored) SSDs as a write staging area could do massively better than the dumb host-managed SMR on these drives.