Wols Lists wrote:
On 16/06/20 10:04, Dale wrote:

I might add, I don't have LVM on that drive.  I read it does not work
well with LVM, RAID etc as you say.  Most likely, that drive will always
be a external drive for backups or something.  If it ever finds itself
on the OS or /home, it'll be a last resort. 

LVM it's probably fine with. Raid, MUCH less so. What you need to make
sure does NOT happen is a lot of random writes. That might make deleting
an lvm snapshot slightly painful ...

But adding a SMR drive to an existing ZFS raid is a guarantee for pain.
I don't know why, but "resilvering" causes a lot of random writes. I
don't think md-raid behaves this way.

But it's the very nature of raid that, as soon as something goes wrong
and a drive needs replacing, everything is going to get hammered. And
SMR drives don't take kindly to being hammered ... :-)

Even in normal use, a SMR drive is going to cause grief if it's not
handled carefully.

Cheers,
Wol

From what I've read, I agree.  Basically, as some have posted in different places, SMR drives are good when writing once and leaving it alone.  Basically, about like a DVD-R.  From what I've read, let's say I moved a lot of videos around, maybe moved the directory structure around, which means a lot of data to move.  I think I'd risk just putting a new file system on it and then backup everything from scratch.  It may take a little longer given the amount of data but it would be easier on the drive.  It would keep it from hammering as you put it that drive to death. 

I've also read about the resilvering problems too.  I think LVM snapshots and something about BTFS(sp?) has problems.  I've also read that on windoze, it can cause a system to freeze while it is trying to rewrite the moved data too.  It gets so slow, it actually makes the OS not respond.  I suspect it could happen on Linux to if the conditions are right.

I guess this is about saving money for the drive makers.  The part that seems to really get under peoples skin tho, them putting those drives out there without telling people that they made changes that affect performance.  It's bad enough for people who use them where they work well but the people that use RAID and such, it seems to bring them to their knees at times.  I can't count the number of times I've read that people support a class action lawsuit over shipping SMR without telling anyone.  It could happen and I'm not sure it shouldn't.  People using RAID and such, especially in some systems, they need performance not drives that beat themselves to death.

My plan, avoid SMR if at all possible.  Right now, I just don't need the headaches.  The one I got, I'm lucky it works OK, even if it does bump around for quite a while after backups are done. 

My new to me hard drive is still testing.  Got a few more hours left yet.  Then I'll run some more tests.  It seems to be OK tho. 

Dale

:-)  :-)