Hi. I am in the market to buy a pair of non-identical ≥ 10 tera-octets hard drives to use as mdadm RAID1. There this info floating around that some large hard drives use a technology named “SMR” and are bad for RAID. Alas, for this kind of information, it is so hard to sift between reliable and up-to-date information and people repeating hearsay.
I mean, if some hard drives are unusable with RAID, at some point the authors of the kernel will implement work-arounds to make them work anyway, and the manufacturers will tweak their firmwares to avoid cutting themselves from the server market. So, does anybody here have up-to-date and reliable information about this issue of SMR hard drives? If I will use the kernel of Debian Trixie or more recent, do I still need to worry about SMR drives, or will they just work? And if I still need to worry, where can we find the information about a specific model before buying? And more to the point: do you have specific models to recommend? Thanks in advance. Regards, -- Nicolas George
