Re: SMR drives - has anybody tried?

[lejeczek]

hi,
from the reading I've done there is that first conclusion - 
it may different a lot with each FS - people theorize. I 
wonder if anybody put them into practice.
I wondered if btrfs/xfs was any good, etx4 in current 
kernels does not support "packed_meta_blocks" yet. Some 
hands-on experience.

thanks


On 03/12/15 21:39, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:

On Thu, Dec 03, 2015 at 03:32:11PM +, lejeczek wrote:

I wonder if there is a user/admin who tried SMR drive and could
share his/her thoughts on them?


Did not try and will not try.

All published reports indicate that write performance is erratic (and quite 
reduced
compared to conventional storage), making them unsuitable to our main 
application
of recording experiment data in near-real time.

These SMR disks are marketed by Seagate as "archive" media, but because they
are very new there is no failure statistics, and the failure modes are not well
understood (if a spot of disk platter goes bad, do I lose just a few sectors, 
like
on normal disks, or do I lose everything, like on a self-bricked SSD?). So does
the reduces cost compensate for the added risk of data loss?

You can also read the reviews at newegg and elsewhere.

K.O.

P.S. FUD check:
Fear - check,
Uncertainty - check,
Deception - hopefully not.

Re: SMR drives - has anybody tried?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 4 December 2015 at 01:25, lejeczek  wrote:
> hi,
> from the reading I've done there is that first conclusion - it may different
> a lot with each FS - people theorize. I wonder if anybody put them into
> practice.
> I wondered if btrfs/xfs was any good, etx4 in current kernels does not
> support "packed_meta_blocks" yet. Some hands-on experience.
> thanks
>

I don't think most of the people who actively post on this list are
into buying cutting edge hardware but are usually dealing with 2-5+
year old hardware. That said SMR should be treated more like a (Write
Once, Read Many) WORM drive. If you are rewriting data to it.. it is
going to be abysmal in speed and use.

http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb

Write performance on SMR seems to be 1/20th of PMR drives so it isn't
really going to matter what the filesystem underneath is because the
largest variable is the drive itself. [EG zfs might increase by 20%
but not the 2000% needed to match PMR]



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.

SMR drives - has anybody tried?

[lejeczek]

hi everybody

I wonder if there is a user/admin who tried SMR drive and 
could share his/her thoughts on them?


many thanks

Re: SMR drives - has anybody tried?

[Konstantin Olchanski]

On Thu, Dec 03, 2015 at 03:32:11PM +, lejeczek wrote:
> 
> I wonder if there is a user/admin who tried SMR drive and could
> share his/her thoughts on them?
> 

Did not try and will not try.

All published reports indicate that write performance is erratic (and quite 
reduced
compared to conventional storage), making them unsuitable to our main 
application
of recording experiment data in near-real time.

These SMR disks are marketed by Seagate as "archive" media, but because they
are very new there is no failure statistics, and the failure modes are not well
understood (if a spot of disk platter goes bad, do I lose just a few sectors, 
like
on normal disks, or do I lose everything, like on a self-bricked SSD?). So does
the reduces cost compensate for the added risk of data loss?

You can also read the reviews at newegg and elsewhere.

K.O.

P.S. FUD check:
Fear - check,
Uncertainty - check,
Deception - hopefully not.

-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada