April 29, 20206 yr Like the title says, has anyone ran a couple of the new WD reds that are SMR and had to replace one? how bad is that process since the drive is using SMR? I currently have 2 of the 6TB wd reds that are SMR and im trying to figure out if i should just sell them and buy seagate iron wolfs.
April 29, 20206 yr Can't speak for the WD Reds in particular, but SMR and unRaid do just fine. Here's a super thorough post back when Seagate introduced the Archive line. In fact I've had a server running solely SMR Seagate Archive drives for Parity and Data with not a single problem for several years. Replacing them with a non-SMR drive isn't an issue, it's transparent to unRaid. The important thing for performance with these drives is to have a fast cache drive (SSD or high performance HDD). That way you will rarely encounter the negatives of the SMR drives - most writes will be stored on your fast cache until the Mover takes them to the array at its leisure.
April 29, 20206 yr I've used SMR drives for years, had one as my parity disk for a long time, then replaced with two WD Reds (thought they were not SMR, oh well, whatever). I haven't run a cache disk ever. No performance issues that I can't attribute to my network.
April 29, 20206 yr 6 hours ago, AliceAlipheese said: Like the title says, has anyone ran a couple of the new WD reds that are SMR and had to replace one? how bad is that process since the drive is using SMR? I currently have 2 of the 6TB wd reds that are SMR and im trying to figure out if i should just sell them and buy seagate iron wolfs. The hoo-hah with WD sending out SMR drives is that it was done quietly and less about the SMR drives themselves. SMR with HDD is quite similar to QLC to SSD. There's a fast write cache that once used up, the drive write speed plummets, which usually only happens with a large amount of random IO. I don't think you will get many direct answer with regards to the WD Red SMR performance since they are rather new. But if they behave anything like the Seagate Archive, they should be just like PMR 5400rpm drive to rebuild. (Typically only large random IO is slow. Rebuild is basically a super long sequential write.) Iron Wolfs are 7200rpm drives so they are faster to rebuild just because 7200rpm is typically faster.
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