I got 9 seagate st3000nm0043 for 100€. It was a good deal anyway however they are smr.
So I wanted to build a NAS. My question: what’s the best cause of action now?
ZFS on smr is probably bad, however UNRAID with cmr parity drives might be fine. or just flip them on ebay?
Unraid sounds seems like a viable solution to me.
Especially it you use cmr for the parity drives.
If you put a ssd in front for caching, you might never notice they are smr.
Be aware though, if you want to encrypt them, that it takes a very long time on smr drives.
I once encrypted an 8 TB seagate smr drive with luks.
It took 14 days nonstop.
A 8 TB cmr drive takes ~ 26 hours.
Also, 9 3TB drives for 100 € is a damn good price, even if they are smr
I have different opinions on SMR drives than other people I guess.
In my opinion they work fine as long as your disk operations are mostly sequential. They work well with MDRAID and EXT4. Do not use them with LVM and never with ZFS. I don’t know about Unraid.
Apologies my initial post was a bit hasty. I was super busy when I replied and didn’t really think it through. I’m on vacation now, and I’m a massive nerd that loves storage so here I am.
Congratulations on the nice find!
@blessed Unraid will be fine with plenty of SSD cache.
CMR parity disk is a good move, obviously remember to make it bigger than the data disks or at lest the same size.
Definitely no zfs, I agree.
Now I’ve left this part until the end, @Blissed. I looked up this part code, and it shows as a, SED, not an SMR disk. It was also released in 2012, and SMR wasn’t introduced until 2013. This may depend on the manufacture date of your disks.
An SED may be similarly slow, but obviously for very different reasons. Also you might want to take steps to clear the crypto keys off the disks before you use them, depending on how much you care.
Or… if you do, just put them in a big JBOD and back it up. At least definitely do not use ZFS or a hardware raid controller (even intel onboard which are half software). The SMR re-write process requires enough time that a lot of raid implementations will consider the drive to have dropped during it - potentially initiating a rebuild which guess what… causes a heap of SMR re-write, which itself causes the controller to think it dropped, etc.
Thanks for all the answers. I could bet I found a seagate datasheet which stated those are smr however I can’t find it now… They are for sure SED, so quite slow - I couldn’t care less about encryption on the drive but that’s what I got. I might just test the random write performance. Anyway the drive manufacture dates are between 19JUL2015 and 08AUG2015.
Clearing the keys might be a good idea however I’ve no clue how.
I never had one, but thought the idea of SED, is that you just throw away/regenerate keys instead of formatting/ erasing the drive?
If it is CMR, as it looks, I would say keep the SED if O/S supports it?
The drive is an older model anyway, 10% improvement would not make that much difference?
Okay in that case I probably got ZFS. Since it’s free and performance is way better than unraid. But I’ll max out my capacity so I buy 5 additional cmr 3tb drives