ABorges 0 Posted April 26, 2020 Share Posted April 26, 2020 Western Digital has started to use a version of SMR Hard Drives in their Series of WD Red Hard Drives, long a favorite of home built servers and NAS enthusiasts https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/ There has been considerable concern about SMR drives - especially used in a RAID - problems during rebuilding specifically I see some discussion here in the past on SMR Tech hard drives and Drivepool - What is the current thinking ? My thought is that Drivepool ,especially with SSD cache enabled, should be more tolerant of drive types ? - Correct Quote Link to post Share on other sites
0 Umfriend 106 Posted April 26, 2020 Share Posted April 26, 2020 I can't imagine DP having issues with drive-managed SMR HDDs. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
0 Christopher (Drashna) 623 Posted April 28, 2020 Share Posted April 28, 2020 No issues. I've been using SMR drives personally since Seagate released the Archive drives. And I have a pool of mixed drives. WD Reds, Seagate NAS, Seagate Archive. The only caveat is that the SMR drives have a "write cache" of non-SMR space. If you fill that (fairly easy to do so), the write speeds get atrociously slow. Because of this, I would recommend using the SSD optimizer, to effectively bypass this issue. Doesn't matter if balancing is slow, since it is any ways. In fact, that's the setup that I have (for years now), and it works wonderfully. ABorges 1 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
0 TomP 0 Posted June 3, 2020 Share Posted June 3, 2020 On 4/28/2020 at 2:23 AM, Christopher (Drashna) said: ...I would recommend using the SSD optimizer, to effectively bypass this issue. Doesn't matter if balancing is slow, since it is any ways.... Is there a user guide for SSD Optimizer so I can set it up correctly ? Quote Link to post Share on other sites
0 Christopher (Drashna) 623 Posted June 9, 2020 Share Posted June 9, 2020 No, there isn't. Basically, it's install it, enable it, select the SSD drives, and that's it. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
0 Chris Downs 9 Posted July 11, 2020 Share Posted July 11, 2020 On 6/3/2020 at 8:54 AM, TomP said: Is there a user guide for SSD Optimizer so I can set it up correctly ? It's a bit too simple for a guide... just remember that you need more than one SSD if your pool has duplication. 2x dupe needs 2x SSD, 3x needs 3 etc. Also, keep in mind that the size of the SSDs determine the maximum filesize you can move onto the pool. I once had a pool with some 64GB SSDs as landing drives, and spend a while scratching my head when I couldn't copy across some large disk-image backups despite the pool having plenty of space. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Question
ABorges 0
Western Digital has started to use a version of SMR Hard Drives in their Series of WD Red Hard Drives, long a favorite of home built servers and NAS enthusiasts
https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/
There has been considerable concern about SMR drives - especially used in a RAID - problems during rebuilding specifically
I see some discussion here in the past on SMR Tech hard drives and Drivepool - What is the current thinking ?
My thought is that Drivepool ,especially with SSD cache enabled, should be more tolerant of drive types ? - Correct
Link to post
Share on other sites
5 answers to this question
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.