Western Digital recently announced new data center HDDs that increase Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) capacity to 32TB and Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) capacity to 26TB. The company...
If you know the format of SMR, then you can trivially see the read performance is not impacted. Writing is impacted, because it has to write multiple times for each sector write (because of overlapping sectors that allow the extra density).
Impacted write performance, coupled with hdds are generally slow with random writes PLUS the extra potential for data loss due to less-atomic sector writes, makes them terrible drives for everything except archival usage.
Obligatory hint that SMR isn’t suited for RAID systems.
Wonder what happens if you throw them in an unraid BTRFS/jbod configuration with a CMR parity drive.
A better way to word it is: SMR is only suited for archival usage. Large writes, little-to-no random writes.
I wonder how the read performance would be.
If you know the format of SMR, then you can trivially see the read performance is not impacted. Writing is impacted, because it has to write multiple times for each sector write (because of overlapping sectors that allow the extra density).
Impacted write performance, coupled with hdds are generally slow with random writes PLUS the extra potential for data loss due to less-atomic sector writes, makes them terrible drives for everything except archival usage.