Status of SMR drives and BTRFS

[MvL (Marcel)]

Hi,

What is the status of SMR drives and BTRFS?

[phillxnet (Philip Guyton)]

@MvL Hello again. I haven’t been following the progress on this one specifically, so I’ll just link again to the thread that seems to have the most info in this area:

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…

Haven’t seen any progress reported for SMR drives in the linux-btrfs mailing list though. So probably down to the nature of the SMR management as before, ie host or disk based.

[MvL (Marcel)]

@phillxnet thank you for answering my post.

I have a couple of Seagate 8TB Archive drives. Not sure what management they have. I think I asked before but can’t recall which forum. If I remember correctly this was also in combination with RAID. Maybe it was ZFS…

@phillxnet

@MvL Hello again. I haven’t been following the progress on this one specifically, so I’ll just link again to the thread that seems to have the most info in this area:

SMR Drives still a problem?

Haven’t seen any progress reported for SMR drives in the linux-btrfs mailing list though. So probably down to the nature of the SMR management as before, ie host or disk based.