SMR Drive Support In Linux 4.8 To Be Further Improved

[phoronix]

Phoronix: SMR Drive Support In Linux 4.8 To Be Further Improved

With the Linux 4.7 kernel came initial work on SMR drives, a.k.a. Shingled Magnetic Recording. With Linux 4.8 the SMR drive support continues to be improved...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SMR-Improvements-Linux-4.8

[arbition]

Having a Seagate Archive drive myself, I am curious as to whether this will affect me at all. I suspect not as it is drive managed, and I doubt hooks are available to do any host side management.

[darkfires]

Only some drives have host-managed abilities, but if you ask me it's a little scary thought using something like that until it's well tested. My first thought on an archive drive is data loss because a buggy Linux driver screws up. I don't really know what kind of hooks are exposed on a host based drive, but it would be interesting to see some benchmarks on with/without the feature enabled, along with some checksums on files before/after.

[Ardje]

Only some drives have host-managed abilities, but if you ask me it's a little scary thought using something like that until it's well tested. My first thought on an archive drive is data loss because a buggy Linux driver screws up. I don't really know what kind of hooks are exposed on a host based drive, but it would be interesting to see some benchmarks on with/without the feature enabled, along with some checksums on files before/after.

You don't want to know how much data loss I already had with buggy firmware SSD's (OCZ of course), and raid controllers. If I have learned anything is to trust the linux kernel, trust your stress tests even more, and don't rely on a single system. But trustworthy raid controllers are hard to find.