On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 10:21 AM Piergiorgio Sartor
[off-list ref] wrote:

On Mon, May 04, 2020 at 12:38:04AM +0100, antlists wrote:

quoted

Has anyone else picked up on this? Apparently 1TB and 8TB drives are still
CMR, but new drives between 2 and 6 TB are now SMR drives.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/309730-western-digital-comes-clean-shares-which-hard-drives-use-smr

What impact will this have on using them in raid arrays?

https://www.smartmontools.org/ticket/1313

I think it is defective abstraction that's the problem, not SMR per se.

For a drive in normal use to fail with write errors like this? It's defective.
[20809.396284] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sdd, sector
3484334688 op 0x1:(WRITE) flags 0x700 phys_seg 2 prio class 0

As to what kind of performance guarantees they've made or implied, I
think they have an obligation to perform no worse than the slowest
speed of CMR "inside track" performance. However, they want to achieve
that is their technical problem. They market DM-SMR as handling
ordinary file systems without local mitigations.


-- 
Chris Murphy