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Yes, there's nothing wrong with SMR at all, if it's not your primary storage device (though I doubt anyone reading this is in danger of making that choice in 20
by reitzensteinm 6y ago
Yes, there's nothing wrong with SMR at all, if it's not your primary storage device (though I doubt anyone reading this is in danger of making that choice in 2020).
It's roughly a 25% boost from the same physical platters. If you're storing large files with a primarily read workload, it's almost certainly the right choice.
- Filligree 6y agoExcept it means you can't use the drives for RAID, as they'll fail the initial resilvering. Worse yet, their firmware appears to be buggy enough that they're not just slow, they start throwing errors once the PMR buffer zone is full.
- zozbot234 6y agoSounds like we'll need to add some sort of buffer congestion avoidance (anti-bufferbloat) logic as part of storage drivers to solve this issue. It can crop up in any use of SMR tech, not just RAID rebuilds. And of course solving this would also mitigate the issue w/ rebuilding drives dropping out of RAID arrays altogether.
- zaarn 6y agoRAID Controllers (Software and Hardware) need to be aware of SMR. The easiest fix is that the controller will not allow you to mix SMR and CMR technologies in a single array. ZFS and friends need to check that too and if there is an SMR drive, give warning and handle it appropriately. You can't resilver an SMR like a CMR; the performance is bad enough that a few controllers will think the drive is dead too.
- tw04 6y agoExcept the drives don’t identify themselves to the OS as SMR, they lie. So it would be on the consumer to guess which drives are smr. I consider that the biggest issue. Drive manufacturers are trying to charge CMR prices for SMR drives.