WD Elements all SMR drives - looking for advice on management

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leprejohn

New Member
Mar 10, 2015
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Hello STH community how are you doing? I brought last Sept, 4TB elements drives which turned out are all WD40EMAZ, finding out these are all SMR drives and I've currently got them in a raid-z1 array.

With a drive failure and the rebuild times are quite long I was wondering sort of what would my options be on these encase I get one that failed. Unfortunately I don't think I can just replace these for something like IronWolf drives due to funds all at once.

Going forward would freenas be okay with the SMR drives or should I look into another solution say windows storage spaces or unraid?
 

sboesch

Active Member
Aug 3, 2012
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Columbus, OH
Do not under any circumstance use SMR drives for ZFS. They are fine stand alone in a workstation. These are not NAS, RAID, or ZFS compliant.
 
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leprejohn

New Member
Mar 10, 2015
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Do not under any circumstance use SMR drives for ZFS. They are fine in a stand alone in a workstation. These are not NAS, RAID, or ZFS compliant.
I am going to replace these for CMR drives, however at the minute these are the only SMR drives I have in there.
 

msg7086

Active Member
May 2, 2017
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SMR drives are simply much slower than CMR (besides the IDNF issue). An SMR drive may work in other RAID technology, however they can be 5x slower than a CMR. If you absolutely want 4TB you can look at ironwolf. Otherwise WD Easystore 12TB is the sweet spot right now.