Is there any way to use SMR drives with Truenas scale?

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
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About a year ago I bought 4 WD60EFAX drives for Truenas. They worked great for a year and then my wife started trying to copy over a lot of data. Mainly small files. 2 drives faulted and cannot resilver. I found the following thread that basically explains that even though they are labeled NAS drives, they really aren’t.

Hindsight is 20/20 but I didn’t know when I bought them, cannot return them and now am just looking for it not to be a complete waste. So my question is can I get any use out of these or am I basically out the $400+ I spent on these. I found a vague reference that if I got an SSD drive to act as a cache that I should be able to make them work. I tried increasing the block size as well to no avail. Thankfully the pool is still up. We had copies of all the data elsewhere as well. So rebuilding from scratch isn’t a problem. I just do not thing I will have much luck trying to sell these and since they have zero SMART errors would like to get some sort of use out of them.

I have seen some Reddit threads and some other places where people just trash on people when they ask these sort of questions instead of providing any guidance at all. I am hoping that won’t be the case here. I have no other use for them right now so I am specifically looking for a way to use them with Truenas. However if that is not possible maybe some suggestions on other home lab uses for them. I don’t have any hardware right now, but I could at least plan for the future.

Thanks in advance!

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There’s not really a way of “fixing” SMR drives, write performance will be poor but if you only plan to use them for “read-only” storage they’re still usable I guess.

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If you set them up as 2 mirrors and make them 1 zpool then they will be o.k. you will only get half the space, and performance will still not be great, but it should be usable. NOTE: this is from internet info, i use ZFS and have used a lot of different drives. But i have no personal experience with SMR drives.

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Just use it as a single disk backup server?

Get a cheap SBC, maybe something like an Odroid or a RockPro64 and use it as a single disk.

You could also use it specifically as a media disk to put your “linux distros” in them or something.

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Do you happen to have a link on how to do that? I did/do have them set up as a raidz2 pool so I already was losing half the space. The system it is in right now is so old I am not really concerned about performance.

Basically I just want to be able to use them without having them constantly fault.

As an alternative solution, what about building a proxmox server and use BTRFS? I see from this video - Getting In The Zone: btrfs on SMR HDDs and NVMe ZNS SSDs - YouTube
that it does support SMR drives. Then I could just create a VM and set up a samba share or something like that. Not as elegant as Truenas, but functional for now and useful for something.

Thoughts?

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IMO

There isn’t really a good way to make the write perf not suck because of how the platter is shingled.

Trying to make it work well is a waste of time and you should just write them off. Lesson learned.

To not waste them they would be fine for single drive backups for cold storage or stuff that you hardly ever need to write to.

For hot data they are absolute trash on any filesystem because you incur a 50% perf hit to write operations.

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the EASIEST way to get to this layout is to just put 2 drives in and create the mirror, and zpool, then put the next 2 drives in and create a mirror, and add it to the already created zpool.

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@Dynamic_Gravity - I never said I care about write performance. For the record I am literally running this on an AMD Phenom II 955. A CPU from 2009. The motherboard doesn’t even have SATA 3 on it. Only SATA 2. Performance was never even a thought.

Honestly this is mostly about just storing photos, videos, music where everyone can get to them. I just want to use the drives and not have them crap out when uploading files, like happened, and then being unable to fix the pool. So telling me to write it off and throw them away isn’t helpful in the slightest. Especially when $400 isn’t nothing to many people. This was a bit of a splurge for hobby/entertainment/learning that my wife and I agreed could give us some tangible benefits too. I’d love to be able to throw thousands of dollars at my hobbies. But that isn’t in the cards right now.

@Zedicus - Thanks for the info. I will give that a try. I will be sure to post if it seems to do the job or not.

From what I found if it doesn’t work, my next best bet is to give BTRFS a try. TrueNAS is out of the question if I go that route, but I can potentially either spin up a Linux box and just do a Samba share, or maybe Proxmox and do a few VM’s to play and learn. Including something with a Samba share.

Yes in the future I know to not buy SMR drives. But the whole reason I posted was hoping that someone would have an idea and hopefully for those who make the same mistake as me there is some information on how to salvage something useful out of it. Besides not wanting to waste money, I also am hoping not to create e-waste.

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Just when SMR drives started to show up, there was hope that they could be an ok match for ZFS. Unfortunately, in practice folks quickly figured out that SMR drives is a bad story all around.

I use one as a removable drive for off-site storage with infrequent rotation.

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Switching this configuration to mirrors will work much better.

I am in a similar situation and found this to be stable although not terribly performant. I found that SMR drives over time create errors in raidz configs, but since I switched them to mirrors they’re working fine.

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I may give it a try, or I may just give openmediavault a try with BTRFS. Thanks for the help everyone. I will post my final setup when complete to hopefully help anyone else who makes the same mistake. Even if not great, finding a way to use them and not have to trash them is good for people’s wallet and the environment.

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Update - so I ended up going with putting the drives in a slightly newer old PC and running proxmox on it and passing them through to openmedia vault running BTRFS. So far so good but still too early to tell. I do not like OMV as much as truenas, but if it works it will do for the foreseeable future. I will try and do another update after a while longer with hopefully a bit more use. Just so if anyone else finds themselves in a similar situation they have something to reference as a possible option.

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I dont think it will behave much different for you in OMV with BTRFS. Keep on eye on your logs, you may be having problems you dont even see that may come back to bite you down the road.

For the sake of these examples, I am assuming SATA…

Here’s an example of what you might look out for…but other messages in syslog may also apply.

[  456.789012] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
[  456.789014] ata1: EH complete
[  456.789015] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#0 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_TIMEOUT
[  456.789017] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#0 CDB: Write(10) 2a 00 00 08 00 00 00 00 08 00
[  456.789018] print_req_error: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 2048
[  456.789020] Buffer I/O error on dev sdb

You may even just see the device randomly reset, something like this

[  789.012345] ata1: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300)

Also passing disks through ProxMox in that way may have it’s own set of problems. Just be warned. You’re probably better served by just using this as a baremetal Linux box with EXT4 TBH…or heck…Windows…