When building a Rockstor NAS for a friend, I chose WD Red drives for a RAID 1 array. Well, it works fine and he’s been quite happy with it for the past few months. But I recently heard about the rather shady issue of WD implementing SMR technology into the Red line of drives, and how they don’t play well with the ZFS file system. (9 days to rebuild an array!) Is the same true with btrfs?
The only issue so far has been writing large files is noticeably slower than I would normally expect. That isn’t really an issue as most of the files sent to the NAS are quite small, but I’m wondering if a drive should fail if we would be in for an inordinately long process of resilvering the mirror?
I so wish I would have gone with Seagate Iron Wolf.