On Fri, Nov 15, 2024 at 10:35 AM Michael <confabul...@kintzios.com> wrote: > > Host managed SMRs (HM-SMR) require the OS and FS to be aware of the need for > sequential writes and manage submitted data sympathetically to this limitation > of the SMR drive, by queuing up random writes in batches and submitting these > as a sequential stream. > > I understand the ext4-lazy option and some patches on btrfs have improved > performance of these filesystems on SMR drivers, but perhaps f2fs will perform > better? :-/
IMO a host-managed solution is likely to be the only thing that will work reliably. If the drive supports discard/trim MAYBE a dumber drive might be able to be used with the right filesystem. Even if you're doing "write-once" workloads any kind of metadata change is going to cause random writes unless the filesystem was designed for SMR. Ideally you'd store metadata on a non-SMR device, though it isn't strictly necessary with a log-based approach. If the SMR drive tries really hard to not look like an SMR drive and doesn't support discard/trim then even an SMR-aware solution probably won't be able to use it effectively. The drive is going to keep doing read-before-write cycles to preserve data even if there is nothing useful to preserve. -- Rich
