So there’s these 25TB drives here, for about $10/TB
How do you use these what filesystem/LVM setup do you use?
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How? Plug them in.
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Aren’t the Host Managed ones, the good ones?
i remember seeing videos about ZFS on them before SMR became big, and HM- were lauded as a way to increase density
I think it was this, from approx 2015
the comments mention F2FS working with them. But I have never actually seen any, just offering it as points to research
you need a host system, that can manage the drives
Not being a dick, but I think it’s a bit like registered memory, where the system has to have the register elsewhere.
Refurbished drives with a troublesome recording method and questionable zoning feature…30% discount compared to regular drives.
Mirrors or single drive backup duty (most people are fine with 25T backup drive). Certainly no parity RAID. I will stay away from those things, but there is a niche…
And experimenting with the Zoning feature can certainly be interesting. Worth 300 bucks? I’m conservative with storage.
I like how they bundled the segment with ZNS in NVMe which is usually associated with QLC. That’s your QLC HDD.
Aren’t they just shitty slow (some times) if you don’t account for their querks? Don’t think you “need” anything special for them.
Current using a “video” HDD (pulled from a DVR) as an OS drive right now. I didn’t do a damn thing special, just plugged it in and installed windows.
Hmmm, btrfs seems to have some support.
https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Zoned-mode.html
@MarcWWolfe apparently these are split into large e.g. 256M or 1GB or some such “append only” zones. Special instructions are used to manage the drives. The filesystem or device mapper that’s aware of the zones is needed to use them properly.
I basically just need more archival storage space, and I’m on the fence about these.
Also I’m in Europe, so ordering e.g. 10 of these, or 10 of anything off that site will cost me about a hundred in shipping +20% for vat.
New 20T regular CMR drives would normally cost me 15/TB, but those would be lower density per port/watt.
I thing our main disconnect is over the use of the word “need”.
Maybe these specific drives have more of a need than the more overview videos I’ve watched.
For archival use. Go for it. Only thing I’d be asking is reliabillity.
This is a good argument. And when talking about archival storage…that’s often write-once read probably never again. You mainly need the capacity, not the performance. And those drives are nowhere near a tape library in “performance”. And reads aren’t the main problem with SMR.
It’s a bit like using a breakout cable to split 4 lanes into four x1 to hook up 4 NVMe drives because you just want the capacity and throughput is tertiary.
If it’s archival and you don’t do random I/O or overwrite stuff all the time…don’t tell anyone, but ZFS might be cool on this. Just don’t complain about 3 weeks of resilver when using RAIDZ. And you wouldn’t use BTRFS RAID5 anyway, right?.
And it’s great for cold storage as far as non-tape storage is concerned. €/TB is king.
I haven’t checked the BTRFS link, but if a filesystem or clever management can compensate a lot by capitalizing on Zoning feature, that’s good.
I think not having a weakness in the first place prevents you from relying on features to compensate for that very weakness. I don’t buy QLC or SMR and ZNS or Zoned storage didn’t convince me (yet). But my use case isn’t archival…so I’m the wrong guy to ask.
Yeah, it’s warm-ish storage, literally movies, photos, backup “archives” ; write gigabytes of data sequentially, then read multi megabyte chunks once in a while, or probably never in the case of backups.
I’m currently using a mix of 16T/18T/20T single disks with btrfs and mergerfs for space balancing and snapraid for parity/redundancy.
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Thumb up for seller being honest with customers :
Are you gents sure your can anctually use Host Managed SMR drives? They are entirely different beast that normal SMR drives, and it isnt just zoning.
These drives offload shitton of critical drive controller work to host device and this tech was never available in consumer or prosumer space. And likely never will be.
Due top that there is also next to nil information available.
Complexity wise this should be like scenario of making m.2 form factor raw nand device without ssd controller, and expecting it work like regulars ssd, plug and play.
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You are thinking Dm-smr
Drive managed ones are the bad performing ones that can just plug and (kinda) play
yep
Seen “HM” and just thought the abreviation that people sometimes pronounced as “hammer”. heat assisted something or other.
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HAMR and MAMR write technlogy? Not in this case though.
To confuse thing a bit more, there are:
- drive managed smr drives
- host aware smr drives
- host managed smr drives
You should be able to use HA-SMR drives if you configure them properly, but no such luck with HM-SMR.
From what little description there is, these drives are likely to be completely unusable without special hardware or custom software stack.
Hey, either someone here got in touch with storagereview or we got lucky. They also bough one of these drives and got it working on a lark.
In the end, key ti get the working seems to be:
- eliminating problematic controllers (even enteprise grade HBAs are a problem), direct sata connection should be best bet
- btrfs
Reference here with minimal benchmarks.
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