Possible issues due to DM-SMR in recent WD, Seagate, Toshiba drives

[janssensm]

Perhaps this is already old or known news for several people but I thought I should share this news, as I now that many people are using WD Red drives for data storage in Proxmox. I also know that it's mostly related to the consumer line, but still.

As mentioned in the bug report from smartmontools [1] these new HDD's can cause issues with ZFS, for instance failing to resilver and bad performance:

WD and Seagate are _both_ shipping drive-managed SMR (DM-SMR) drives which don't report themselves as SMR when questioned via conventional means.

People that buy a new hdd or need an RMA replacement for an older CMR drive could run into problems, when they would get this "new type" of drive.
There has been some communication from the vendors. Here is the official announcement from Western Digital [2]
On the freenas forum a list of resources on this topic is collected [3]
Added extra link form Arstechnica, as the author is very active on ZFS on reddit [4]

[1] https://www.smartmontools.org/ticket/1313
[2] https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/
[3] https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/list-of-known-smr-drives.83993/
[4] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...re-being-submarined-into-unexpected-channels/

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

Thanks for raising the issue here as well - given that many of our users do use ZFS (and there a resilver can run into rather sever troubles with the SMR drives) - the information will help some of them!