Re: Problems with SMR hard drives
Hi,
On Wed, Sep 24, 2025 at 03:52:39PM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> AFAIK their performance for RAID is no worse than for non-RAID uses.
> There might be specific RAID uses where they suck more (apparently RAID
> as done by ZFS is among them), but according to the above tests it's not
> much worse at RAID than at other things.
Issues I have personally seen with these types of drives put into a
conventional RAID environment:
- pitiful random write performance once internal drive caches are exceeded
- extremely slow rebuild/scrub speeds sometimes ten times slower than
what I would expect from CMR drives.
I think the poor performance would be unacceptable to most people. The
extremely lengthy scrub cycles prove to be unwelcome throughout
operational life, and when a failure does happen the vastly extended
period of risk is very much not what is desired in a system that is
supposed to be redundant.
Taken as a whole it's definitely not how I would design a storage system
like most RAIDs, and it's pretty easy to not do that. Possibly they got
better since the last time I saw someone try to use these, but still
it's easy to avoid, so it's not really a trade-off I will ever think
about.
Thanks,
Andy
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