SMR Drives still a problem?

[phillxnet (Philip Guyton)]

@kullboys Welcome to the Rockstor community.

Linking (for context) to @Dragon2611’s thread of the same Title and almost identical wording !!

SMR Drives still a problem?

What’s the status of SMR drivies and the Linux kernel/BTRFS these days? I seem to recall it didn’t work to well in the past, has this been resolved or should they still be avoided? Slow write speed isn’t really an issue as my rockstor box is remote (I.e incoming is limited by WAN speeds anyway), having the drives drop offline however would be. I have a 3TB drive I need to replace at some point (showing a few bad sectors), can’t decide to go for a raid5 with 4TB-5TB drives or a raid1 with 2x 8…