SMR Host Managed Hard Drive Questions

blackbirdz

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Jul 18, 2018
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I bought HGST 12TB SMR SATA HDD and I found out this is the Host Managed HDD.

I plugged in to Dell R720 Integrated SATA Controller, it recognized the Drive in the BIOS, which is a good sign. But upon login to Windows 2016, the OS refused to initialize/format the Drive, showing an error or something. I then used old Storage Controller (Adaptec 2268100-R), it recognized the HDD in BIOS level, but same thing inside Windows. Disk Management shows there is new HDD installed, but initialization always fail.

My question is: is there anyway to make Host Managed HDD to work in Windows environment? Do I need special Storage Controller to make the Drive works in Windows? In short, how to use this Host Managed HDD? Yes, I read about ZAC/ZBC, it is New to me and beyond my understanding. All this time, I thought SATA is simply plug & play. Let me know if anyone here has some experience on this.
 

HoneyBadger

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While there has been a fair bit of work done in terms of translation layers, none of them make will SMR drives appropriate for a non-SMR aware filesystem, and OpenZFS is definitely not SMR-aware at present. There has been some work done on F2FS and ext4 to make it more palatable but as of now, I don't believe there has been significant progress with OpenZFS on any platform. Even if they were DM-SMR (drive managed) the lack of filesystem support would result in you having an extremely poor experience.

Your best course of action is to return the drives and purchase conventional/perpendicular (CMR/PMR) recording drives instead.
 

blackbirdz

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Thanks for your feedback. So the question is: If Windows OS (even Windows 2016) does not support Host Managed Drive, what OS does? Ubuntu?
 

HoneyBadger

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Thanks for your feedback. So the question is: If Windows OS (even Windows 2016) does not support Host Managed Drive, what OS does? Ubuntu?

Linux has varying degrees of support for HA/HM-SMR devices, but unless the filesystem also has some level of awareness the performance will be inconsistent and likely poor. Seagate has a github page for ext4 extensions (SMRFFS) at https://github.com/Seagate/SMR_FS-EXT4 - F2FS also is reported to work well, and BTRFS is working on supporting it.

Some major storage players like DropBox have used HM-SMR drives to great advantage, but for general purpose workloads and OpenZFS, SMR still needs to be avoided.
 
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