ZFS External Drive for Datastore for a Small Proxmox Backup Server USBC C connection to USB A Adapter.

[Jarvar]

Probably not ideal, but currently experimenting with a local PBS with an External Drive setup as a Zpool. Everything works fine, but when I zfs send and zfs recv I start to get a lot of I/O errors.
If I use it as a backup only it seems to be okay.
This only occurs with a new WD Passport Ultra drive that has a USB C to USB A adapter for older hardware.
The USB 3.0 to to USB Micro connection version doesn't seem to throw up any errors. Same 5 TB Capacity in a 2.5" format.

Any thoughts? Thank you.

 

[Dunuin]

Check if the new HDD uses shingled magnetic recording. If it is it can cause read/write errors because the latency might get that bad that ZFS thinks the disk is dead, because it can't answer in time. Manufacturers usually won't tell you what disk model is inside that external disk enclosure, as they want to put every in there whats left over.

 

[Jarvar]

@Dunuin I'm not sure exactly how to tell, but in all likelihood is that the drives are SMR. They're SATA, WD Passport drives. Somewhat slower than the previous generation even. A few years ago, the external 2.5" drives were around 5400 to 5900 RPM. These others are showing 4800 RPM.
I'm doing some tests, since the older generation but still new USB 3.0 to USB Micro hasn't had any error and has transferred about 100 GiB without errors so far. So like you said it could be the SMR drives, but they should both be SMR drives, so it could be the adapter or connection is my second guess.
I'm double checking the drives I have on hand, maybe I didn't firmly click all the connectors together. I'll keep testing.
Thank you for your insights.