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Comment by usernew | Hacker News Reader

It's not mumbo jumbo at all. Please read the rest of that wiki article. This is not a regular HDD. Buy a few, build a RAID out of them, then try to rebuild a drive while the front-end is online. You'll probably get data corruption and everything will crash.

It's an HDD technology that has to be combined with very specific type of logical volume management and protection workloads, and is very cheap at the tradeoff of these limitations.

To build a large, fault tolerant storage system on top of this "just another HDD technology" as you call it, is not something you can do at home with your normal tools. They did it, and they saved lots of cost because of that.

Do you ever walk into a meeting with an engineer SME talking about a topic which you had to look up on wiki, and because you don't understand what he's saying you dismiss it as "tech mumbo jumbo?" You will be very successful as middle-management at a large corporation.

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> and is very cheap at the tradeoff of these limitations

Where can I get SMR drives that are a good deal? And what percent price improvement are you seeing?

When I look at the drives I can easily buy, the bigger models are all CMR and the smaller models keep having SMR snuck in without any notable price reduction.

I suspect they only bother selling large capacity SMR drives to hyperscalers, because at high capacities (eg. 8TB+), the workload for non-hyperscaler customers is usually something like RAID5 or ZFS, which is terrible on SMR drives. Hyperscalers don't have this problem, because they have custom software that can use features like ZNS to make SMR drives bearable, and on the lower end, there are enough "normies" (for lack of a better term) who are just using their drives to copy files back and forth, and probably won't hammer the drives with RAID5 rebuilds or ZFS resilver.

Are RAID5 rebuilds a problem? I thought the issue with ZFS was how scattered the writes are (with work happening on improving that), and RAID should just be a linear sweep.

No idea where you or I can get them, but for low-tier enterprise archival storage, vendors either put them into their own archival-tier arrays, or buy directly from the HDD vendors.

I think of SMR like Optane. A bunch of consumer-level tech guys w/o a real job got all lit up and started arguing about it online, but its target market was not the "NewEgg website" market, it was the "million dollar storage array from IBM" market.

Remember, there are many workloads that are "write this on disk and keep it forever" - even historical data in a data warehouse showing soda sales by season.

I honestly haven't bought any storage or compute in 25 years - my personal crap is old "enterprise/business line" junk from work.

Where you, as a consumer, can get them - don't. I don't think they're meant to be used by consumers. You're gonna have a bad time unless you write software specific to this weird type of drive. What you might find out there is some kind of a storage 'consumer NAS in a box' product that has tiered storage inside, with these drives and other ones. But stay away from drives on their own w/o that special software in front.

Though as a consumer it was easy to buy an optane card.

Not the dimms as much but those had horrible prices per gig, and SMR is supposedly a way to save money.

> Where you, as a consumer, can get them - don't. I don't think they're meant to be used by consumers. You're gonna have a bad time unless you write software specific to this weird type of drive. What you might find out there is some kind of a storage 'consumer NAS in a box' product that has tiered storage inside, with these drives and other ones. But stay away from drives on their own w/o that special software in front.

That would be a reasonable statement if they weren't selling SMR drives to customers without even labeling them as such. Just raw drives that sometimes have the performance go to hell. If you wanted fast you should have gotten an SSD, I guess.

It's not that I can't easily get an SMR drive, it's that I can't get the bigger models and I can't get the price savings.

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