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Interesting data. Overall surprised at how few failures they saw.

From an interview last year, it sounds like they don't use SMR drives[1]. I would be interested if there is any good source for failure rates of those.

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-backblaze-buys-hard-drive...

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Yev from Backblaze here -> Yea, we've tested them but found they didn't play nice so we aren't deploying them in droves. If you find a good place for data on SMRs send it our way, would be fun to read up on it!

Did you try host-managed SMR? Seems more promising, although significantly more effort.

Not sure on that one actually. I think one of the main things for us was the rewrite performance, since we're constantly moving/copying/deleting/changing data we need that to be fairly performant - but not sure about the host-managed drives!

SMR performs like crap and doesn't save much money on density, so it's a poor play for anything except tape-replacement.

Personal anecdote: F2FS copes so well with SMR that for consumer use, there's not much of a difference (assuming you can run Linux, etc). No write pauses observed here.

Any articles or writeups anywhere on this? Is F2FS stuitable for production use?

> Is F2FS stuitable for production use?

It's widely deployed on Android, if that counts.

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