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Comment by mynewtb | Hacker News Reader

> since the drive was already somewhat used

You are spreading a lot of FUD based on one single anecdote with a used drive. Let me counter that anecdote with my own complete satisfaction of using such drive for over a year of daily backups without anything 'taking days'.

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I bought it new. It was used by me in a prior filesystem (ext4) to attempt backing up files, so the drive had actively written user sectors on it before trying out a linear log filesystem for the same backups. If instead I had used such a FS on the drive in its new state, there might have been a possibility of better performance, depending on the internal drive management software. The notion of returning it to a state where it considered sectors unused is also dependent on that software.

Why does it matter that the drive was used? If I can permanently damage my performance by using a different filesystem for a while, that's a big deal. It's not FUD to talk about how drive-managed SMR is unpredictable, and might work great or might work horribly, and you can't entirely predict what you'll get.

Why should filesystem specifics matter to the device itself? If you believe that is the case, did you rewrite the whole drive with zeros or something, or better yet use some device builtin erase function?

> Why should filesystem specifics matter to the device itself?

I agree! That's why I think "drive was used" should not be a disqualifier for seeing horrible performance. Why should a former filesystem matter?

> did you rewrite

Not my drive.

A used drive might have been treated badly, have thousands of online hours etc

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