public inbox for gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: William Kenworthy <billk@iinet.net.au>
To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] SMR drives (WAS: cryptsetup close and device in use when it is not)
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2021 13:14:34 +0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <56d64f52-1b9a-1309-c720-06bb63c9f80a@iinet.net.au> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <YQMVtr83vkfzS0nP@kern>


On 30/7/21 4:55 am, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
> Am Thu, Jul 29, 2021 at 05:46:16PM +0100 schrieb Wols Lists:
>
>>> Yea. First the SMR fiasco became public and then there was some other PR
>>> stunt they did that I can’t remember right now, and I said “I can’t buy WD
>>> anymore”. But there is no real alternative these days. And CMR drives are
>>> becoming ever rarer, especially in the 2.5″ realm. Except for one single
>>> seagate model, there isn’t even a bare SATA drive above 2 TB available on
>>> the market! Everything above that size is external USB stuff. And those
>>> disks don’t come with standard SATA connectors anymore, but have the USB
>>> socket soldered onto their PCB.
>>>
>> Are you talking 2.5" drives here?
> I meant in general, but – as I said – “especially in the 2.5″ realm”. ;-)
> For 3.5″, it’s mostly the low-capacity drives that are affected. Probably
> because here the ratio of fixed cost (case, electronics) vs. per-capacity
> cost (platters, heads) is higher, so the pressure to reduce manufacturing
> cost is also higher. High-capacity drives tend to remain CMR at the mo’.
>
>> The SMR stunt was a real cock-up as far as raid was concerned - they
>> moved their WD Red "ideal for raid and NAS" drives over to SMR and
>> promptly started killing raid arrays left right and centre as people
>> replaced drives ... you now need Red Pro so the advice for raid is just
>> "Avoid WD".
> Red Plus is fine, too. I think the “Plus” is marketing speak for non-SMR.
> Which is why probably SMRs now have the price tag of old CMRs, and the new
> CMRs have a “plus” on the price tag.
>
>> From what I can make out with Seagate, the old Barracuda line is pretty
>> much all CMR, they had just started making some of them SMR when the
>> brown stuff hit the rotating blades.
> Seagate made a statement that their NAS drives are not and never will be SMR.
>
>
>
> In case someone is interested, here’s a little experience report:
>
> Two days ago, I bought a 2.5″ WD My Passport 4 TB for a new off-site backup
> strategy I want to implement. They even killed the rubber feet on the
> underside to save a few cents. >:'-( ) Interestingly, the even cheaper
> elements series (which is the cheapest because it has no complimentary
> sofware and no encryption or password feature) still has them. Probably
> because its case design is older.
>
> I just finished transferring my existing Borg backup repos. Right at the
> beginning, I tested a small repo of 3 GiB and I got good throughput. After
> around 2 GiB or so the drive went down to 10 MiB/s for a very long time
> (writing at least another 3 GiB, I have no idea what that was).
>
> I was already pondering my options. But once that was over, I’ve since been
> writing 1,2 TiB to the drive with rsync happily without any glitches,
> averaging at slightly above 100 MiB/s. I used SMR-friendly ext4 settings and
> Borg uses datafiles of 500 MiB size, which greatly reduces sprinkled
> metadata writes b/c it’s only a few thousand files instead of millions.
>
> According to smartctl, the drive claims to support Trim, but so far I’ve
> been unsuccessful to invoke it with fstrim. First I had to enable the
> allow-discard option in the underlying LUKS container, which is disabled by
> default for security reasons. But either I’m still missing a detail, or the
> USB-SATA-bridge really does not support it. Or it does, but the kernel is
> unaware: yesterday I read an article about enabling a flag for the USB
> controller via a custom UDEV rule. Who knows.
>
I am using a seagate USB3 backup disk (4Tb SMR) for borgbackup on
btrfs.  Yes, it works well on regular backups, but its dismally slow 
for anything else (operations that read or write large amounts of data
at once):

1. Adding a lot of new data to a repo is extra slow

2. btrfs scrub (a couple of days)

3. borg repair (days!)

I had an unscheduled crash that lost a btrfs segment - scrub showed it
as an uncorrectable error so I deleted the file involved and borg repair
zeroed that part of the repo so its still ok. On a regular backup run
its fine, but if recovery time if you have an error is a real problem.

BillK






  parent reply	other threads:[~2021-07-30  5:17 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 64+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2021-06-14  4:50 [gentoo-user] cryptsetup close and device in use when it is not Dale
2021-06-15 13:48 ` Ramon Fischer
2021-06-15 14:21   ` Dale
2021-06-15 14:52     ` Jack
2021-06-15 15:26       ` Dale
2021-06-15 19:04         ` Ramon Fischer
2021-06-21  4:18         ` Dale
2021-06-21  4:49           ` Dale
2021-06-21  5:41             ` Dale
2021-06-21  5:59               ` Dale
2021-06-28  3:35                 ` Dale
2021-07-05  3:19                   ` Dale
2021-07-06 18:40                     ` Ramon Fischer
2021-07-06 19:43                       ` Dale
2021-07-07 14:48                       ` Dr Rainer Woitok
2021-07-07 18:08                         ` Dale
2021-07-08  8:20                           ` Ramon Fischer
2021-07-12  8:31                             ` Dale
2021-07-12 13:14                               ` Ramon Fischer
2021-08-02 13:33                                 ` Dale
2021-08-09 13:38                                   ` Ramon Fischer
2021-09-19 11:55                                     ` Dale
2021-07-25 20:29                           ` Frank Steinmetzger
2021-07-25 23:10                             ` Dale
2021-07-26 21:00                               ` Frank Steinmetzger
2021-07-26 22:48                                 ` Dale
2021-07-29 16:46                                 ` Wols Lists
2021-07-29 20:55                                   ` [gentoo-user] [OT] SMR drives (WAS: cryptsetup close and device in use when it is not) Frank Steinmetzger
2021-07-29 21:31                                     ` Frank Steinmetzger
2021-07-30 12:48                                       ` Frank Steinmetzger
2021-07-30  5:14                                     ` William Kenworthy [this message]
2021-07-30 14:29                                       ` Rich Freeman
2021-07-30 16:50                                         ` antlists
2021-07-30 18:38                                           ` Rich Freeman
2021-07-31  3:14                                         ` William Kenworthy
2021-07-31  3:50                                           ` Wols Lists
2021-07-31  4:58                                             ` William Kenworthy
2021-07-31 12:12                                               ` Rich Freeman
2021-08-01  0:41                                                 ` Frank Steinmetzger
2021-08-01  0:56                                                   ` Rich Freeman
2021-07-31 16:38                                               ` antlists
2021-08-01  0:50                                               ` Frank Steinmetzger
2021-08-01  3:36                                                 ` William Kenworthy
2021-08-01  3:46                                                   ` William Kenworthy
2021-08-01 21:38                                                     ` Frank Steinmetzger
2021-08-02  5:38                                                       ` William Kenworthy
2021-08-02 21:52                                                         ` Frank Steinmetzger
2021-08-02 23:10                                                           ` William Kenworthy
2021-08-03  8:18                                                             ` Frank Steinmetzger
2021-08-05 20:40                                                               ` Frank Steinmetzger
2021-08-06  7:22                                                                 ` William Kenworthy
2021-08-01 21:55                                                   ` Frank Steinmetzger
2021-08-02  6:12                                                     ` William Kenworthy
2021-08-02 22:03                                                       ` Frank Steinmetzger
2021-08-02 23:35                                                         ` William Kenworthy
2021-08-01  3:41                                                 ` William Kenworthy
2021-08-01 21:41                                                   ` Frank Steinmetzger
2021-07-31 12:21                                             ` Rich Freeman
2021-07-31 12:59                                               ` William Kenworthy
2021-07-31 13:30                                                 ` Rich Freeman
2021-08-01  3:05                                                   ` William Kenworthy
2021-08-01 11:37                                                     ` Rich Freeman
2021-07-31  5:23                                           ` William Kenworthy
2021-06-15 17:48     ` [gentoo-user] Re: cryptsetup close and device in use when it is not Remy Blank

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=56d64f52-1b9a-1309-c720-06bb63c9f80a@iinet.net.au \
    --to=billk@iinet.net.au \
    --cc=gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox