I know these type of drives are primarily for cold-storage use, and really not intended for use in a RAID set (at least not one that does not know how to address SMR drives).
At the risk of incurring the wrath of the Seagate haters, I'd like to know if anyone has used two or more of this type of drive with ZFS. For non-changing items like media libraries, these would be a nice cost optimized path. I am aware of the performance issues that may arise with heavy writing or re-writing to SMR drives, but that should be minimized if an SMR pool is only used for slow/non-changing media. I'd most like to hear if anyone has done RAID-Z or RAID-Z2 with this type of drive, and if they had any problems with the storage pool.
I may pick one up just to see how they perform in a single drive pool, with the data backed up in an offline array of multiple disks. It should still benefit from the lower power usage for fewer online drives and can still scrub for errors to find them, even if it can't repair them.
At the risk of incurring the wrath of the Seagate haters, I'd like to know if anyone has used two or more of this type of drive with ZFS. For non-changing items like media libraries, these would be a nice cost optimized path. I am aware of the performance issues that may arise with heavy writing or re-writing to SMR drives, but that should be minimized if an SMR pool is only used for slow/non-changing media. I'd most like to hear if anyone has done RAID-Z or RAID-Z2 with this type of drive, and if they had any problems with the storage pool.
I may pick one up just to see how they perform in a single drive pool, with the data backed up in an offline array of multiple disks. It should still benefit from the lower power usage for fewer online drives and can still scrub for errors to find them, even if it can't repair them.
