It does not matter how much existing data you have on a "device managed" SMR drive. What matters if how many GBs you write per hour. If you write less than ~20 GB per hour per drive you'll be fine. If you write faster, the performance will be around 1-5 % of the usual until you (or bad latency) slow down enough for the drive to flush the PMR/CMR cache area. For short enough bursts, SMR drives are just fine. And they are fine for reading in all cases.
Highest Capacity Hard Drive with no SMR?
in Storage Devices and Controllers
Posted
It does not matter how much existing data you have on a "device managed" SMR drive. What matters if how many GBs you write per hour. If you write less than ~20 GB per hour per drive you'll be fine. If you write faster, the performance will be around 1-5 % of the usual until you (or bad latency) slow down enough for the drive to flush the PMR/CMR cache area. For short enough bursts, SMR drives are just fine. And they are fine for reading in all cases.
See also: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/489530/20336