apologies for the subject header being kind of an opinion poll rather than a question. but it is meant as a question.
until now, i have avoided lvm and zfs determinedly. i have always been completely satisfied to copy some big partition rather than deal with the complexity of those. i don't want to get confused about them when i am debugging or setting up. i use luks and ext4 and that's enough complexity for me. i get them right, understand them, and glory in few corner cases. i have a new 4tb portable external drive. i want it to have a huge partition. even such things as resizing sound error-prone or complex. more layers and commands to learn. and zfs is a whole new thing, with, oh, yeah, you have to use contrib or non-free [can i rely on this being secure and also available into the future?] and oh, yeah, it's different from luks, and oh, yeah, do a balance/resilver/whatever. yes, send/recv beckons. but now i am thinking, with smr, the drive could pseudo-brick, despite discard and fstrim. and i might then want to do some kind of, idk, dd if=/dev/zero of=some-partition to "reset" it. and my 20gb root partition might be too small for that. i don't actually know if /dev/zero resets smr to stop shuffling. i am just speculating. but if it does, then i might want lvm's or zfs's resizing feature so that i can do /dev/zero to some lo... gical ... volume? which would then in my imagination reset smr and then the drive would work again instead of 3.6tb filled non-writable. idk if zfs/btrfs has smr features better than ext4 or vice-versa. i do NOT need snapshotting, raid. my box is old and would not support deduplication and i wonder if it would even support zfs at all at 6gb which always gets filled up with firefox. so, am i going to need one of these two more-complex-than-luks-and-ext4 technologies just for safety when the huge partition fills up? i know they are /desirable/ technologies for those who like them. but desirability is not the question at all. :) the question is, for MY case, is lvm/zfs/btrfs? going to be needed for smr. idk if i am on this mailing list. preliminary comments below. :) p.s. as a preliminarty comment, i have partitioned it for booting, my idea being for it to boot off of anything for quick perfectly-my-env rescue, not for all the time use. i ahve accessibility issues that make installing and rescue cd's problematic.] as more preliminary, the thing does not boot on my old bios box no matter what i try. and yet more preliminary, it is toshiba canvio basics. it does spindown or head parking at a ridiculously low delay. idk if hdparm -y or -Y or scsi-spin or scsiadd or eject or idle3 or what is safest. or if i should let it rack up those smartctl attrs. and another. i am limited in computer use and have a very large number of limitations that i cannot go into beause it would take too much out of me to do so. i am not a normal kind of user. but i'd still like gentle, helpful comments on my question if anybody has some. i've seen issues with myself and others in the past [not on this list] with "help" being used as a very transparent, quite obvious excuse for being a rather extreme jerk, and i'd be interested in knowing of some accepted things to say that say "thanks, but i do not want 'help' from you personally at all but others are still very welcome to contribute as i know already that they are sincere and helpful" other than quitting the place entirely [at this point always my best option]. the idea being to encourage sincere others to help while getting others to realize i do not want help from the problem person and that my not replying to the problem person does not mean sincere others can't contribute, i/e/ the problem person has not claimed accepted ownerhip over helping me and i am in no mood to be attacked merely for asking a question or having accessibility and other limitations or for no reason at all.
