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I've heard that SMR drives don't work well with RAID, but that's what I'm stuck with; even a JBOD/linear array would be better than nothing.

*Results in a r/w speed that is greater than or similar to the r/w speed of the slowest drive

My apprehension is based on reports from ServeTheHome:

When that NAS readiness was put to the test the drive performed spectacularly badly. The RAIDZ results were so poor that, in my mind, they overshadow the otherwise decent performance of the drive.

Confirmed by ArsTechnica:

At absolute best, SMR disks underperform significantly in comparison to CMR disks; at their worst, they can fall flat on their face so badly that they may be mistakenly detected as failed hardware.

And many anecdotal reports from other users in the DataHoarder (and similar) subreddit(s).

Note that while the discussion seems to be only on ZFS RAIDz performance, I strongly suspect that all similarly-functioning RAID implementations will be affected, too.

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  • Care to share what you read? What you read might not even be true.
    – Ramhound
    Jan 7, 2021 at 13:58
  • @Ramhound See my updated question.
    – ATLief
    Jan 7, 2021 at 15:05
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    that's what I'm stuck with Given what I read in your links, your first priority should be to make sure your backup systems all work and they all work well. Then I'd get something like an LSI RAID HBA, create a RAID-5 or RAID-6 array with 5 or 6 disks and do a full init of the array that actually touches the entire set of drives and not a "quick" init. See how long that takes. Don't do anything else until that init completes. When you get asked why it's taking so long, just show 'em the screen with the init progress on it.
    – Andrew Henle
    Jan 7, 2021 at 15:48

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