> On Jul 30, 2026, at 9:32 AM, Andy Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Thu, Jul 30, 2026 at 07:17:01AM -0600, Casey Deccio wrote: >> Seagate BarraCuda 5TB Internal Hard Drive HDD – 2.5 Inch SATA 6Gb/s 5400 RPM >> 128MB > > Almost all high capacity 2.5" SATA drives are SMR (shingled magnetic > recording) and are really intended for use in laptops, not for serious > server purposes. I haven't checked this model but I would be very > surprised if it's not SMR, and the 5.4kRPM also suggests not for server > use. > > SMR drives have a write cache and after this write cache is filled, the > write performance is absolutely terrible. A lot of people find them > unsuitable for use in RAID arrays (or zfs pools) because even the > periodic scrub can't complete in a reasonable time period. > > This could easily explain the very low performance under write load > here. Have you used these models of drive before with a better > performance outcome? > > Consumer-level SATA SSDs will definitely perform better though the cost > will be eye-watering (in comparison) for 3x ~4TB or 3x ~8TB. This is an > issue I have struggled with myself - very very hard to find decently > performing 2.5" SATA drives.
Thanks for the info. For this system I did optimize for cost, understanding that there would be some tradeoffs with regard to performance. I didn't suspect that these issues were related to the drives because I have another setup using the same drives, and it doesn't have this same issue. To be clear, it has these same drives and it is using a RAID5, but it's on a different motherboard using a MegaRAID controller with hardware RAID. Thanks, Casey
