My primary storage use-case is physical media backups. I literally don’t care how long it takes to store, a bluray is 70GB and I’ve got around 200 of em to backup.
Does it really matter that much if the first copy takes a while though? Only doing it once and you don’t even have to do it all in 1 go. Just let it run over the weekend would do though.
Sure, if you have many TBs of data changes per day you probably want a different solution. But that would also suggest you don’t need to keep it for very long.
Write speeds on SMR drives start to stagnate after mere gigabytes written, not after terabytes. As soon as the CMR cache is full, you’re fucked, and it stagnates to utterly unusable speeds as it’s desperately trying to balance writing out blocks to the persistent area of the disk and accepting new incoming writes. I have 25 year old consumer level IDE drives that perform better than an SMR drive in this thrashing state.
Also, I often use hard drives as a temporary holding area for stuff that I’m transferring around for one reason or another and that absolutely sucks if an operation that normally takes an hour or two is suddenly becoming a multi-day endeavour tying up my computing resources. I was burned once when Seagate submarined SMR drives into the Barracuda line, and I got a drive that was absolutely unfit for purpose. Never again.
The first copy of anything big will suck ass… and why else would you get a 36TB drive if not to copy a lot of data to it?
My primary storage use-case is physical media backups. I literally don’t care how long it takes to store, a bluray is 70GB and I’ve got around 200 of em to backup.
Does it really matter that much if the first copy takes a while though? Only doing it once and you don’t even have to do it all in 1 go. Just let it run over the weekend would do though.
It matters to me. I got stuff to back up regularly, and I ain’t got all weekend.
It’s only the first copy that takes such a long time. After that you only copy the changes.
That depends entirely on your usecase.
Sure, if you have many TBs of data changes per day you probably want a different solution. But that would also suggest you don’t need to keep it for very long.
Write speeds on SMR drives start to stagnate after mere gigabytes written, not after terabytes. As soon as the CMR cache is full, you’re fucked, and it stagnates to utterly unusable speeds as it’s desperately trying to balance writing out blocks to the persistent area of the disk and accepting new incoming writes. I have 25 year old consumer level IDE drives that perform better than an SMR drive in this thrashing state.
Also, I often use hard drives as a temporary holding area for stuff that I’m transferring around for one reason or another and that absolutely sucks if an operation that normally takes an hour or two is suddenly becoming a multi-day endeavour tying up my computing resources. I was burned once when Seagate submarined SMR drives into the Barracuda line, and I got a drive that was absolutely unfit for purpose. Never again.