Problems with SMR hard drives

[Nicolas George <george@nsup.org>]

Hi.

I am in the market to buy a pair of non-identical ≥ 10 tera-octets hard
drives to use as mdadm RAID1. There this info floating around that some
large hard drives use a technology named “SMR” and are bad for RAID.
Alas, for this kind of information, it is so hard to sift between
reliable and up-to-date information and people repeating hearsay.

I mean, if some hard drives are unusable with RAID, at some point the
authors of the kernel will implement work-arounds to make them work
anyway, and the manufacturers will tweak their firmwares to avoid
cutting themselves from the server market.

So, does anybody here have up-to-date and reliable information about
this issue of SMR hard drives?

If I will use the kernel of Debian Trixie or more recent, do I still
need to worry about SMR drives, or will they just work?

And if I still need to worry, where can we find the information about a
specific model before buying?

And more to the point: do you have specific models to recommend?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George