Dale, "Dale" <rdalek1...@gmail.com>, 06.01.2020, 09:29:
> Also, when looking for a drive to buy, what should one look at to see if > it is a SMR drive? While it may be OK for my backups, I'd like to avoid > them on the drives inside my rig that are used for the OS or /home. I > dunno, just a gut thing. it's not "just a gut thing". SMR drives are not meant for random access writing; they write like a tape and read like a disk. A while ago, one of my clients bought one of those things to replace an older failing backup drive. The next night, the backup took hours instead of minutes. No knowing what was inside the box, I did some measurements and discovered that the first few files were written quickly, then things got really slow, with the rsync process waiting (state "D") for the drive to finish. tar-based backups went much quicker, though, which matches the expected behaviour of SMR drives; the drive did not need to rewrite many large areas due to many small changes, instead it only had to write one large area due to one large change. s.
