this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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From what I understand, SMR is fine for NAS as long as you aren't doing a lot of reads. Like hosting a multimedia server that pulls videos and stuff from the NAS. I recently stood up a TrueNAS server a few months ago with SMR WD disks and it works fine for my use case. It's RAIDed and backed up to cloud storage. I'm now looking into standing up a media server, but I won't use that NAS storage for that.
The real downside to SMR drives is "random" writes; adjacent tracks need to be re-written, and then their adjacent tracks, and that keeps going until the tracks adjacent to a write happen to be empty. It doesn't matter much for long sequential writes (because adjacent tracks will be overwritten anyway). I think the re-writing process also hurts read performance for the host, but reads alone don't cause rewriting.
If you need to reshape/resilver your array (grow, shrink, or change geometry), it'll probably take weeks or months with an SMR drive compared to days for a CMR drive.
Yeah, SMR is fine for read. And for most homelabs, I'd guess it would be fine. SMR would be a bastard in a high read/write scenario like in an enterprise. But I think all the Red Plus and Red Pros are all CMR now. Only the base Reds have SMR from the sample I took.