Enterprise IT software generally slowing down computers and actually reducing their useful lifetime so that enterprises have to shorten their IT renewal lifecycles? And all of it for no discernible benefit? Color me surprised.

wierd_w wrote on 2025-04-11, 15:22:

I disagree here, as SMR drives need long periods of being powered and spun up, without accesses happening, to reshingle. Otherwise data rots in the cmr cache area, and it never gets vacated to the smr area.

It's best-use scenario is as a read only volume serving boot images for emergency recovery, or embedded platforms, IMO.

What I had in mind for "typical" external drive workload is bulk file copying for backup purposes. I am uncertain how typical that is in general.

You can let them chill around powered up for a while after copying.

Read mostly type of workloads is what these things are aimed at yes.

darry wrote on 2025-04-12, 00:02:

Mine seem to be doing well. When mdraid runs a check, they don't seems to take an eternity to finish.
I only run these drives in a mirror. Nobody should run these in parity RAID or ZFS or anything that is inherently write-heavy.
EDIT: Hardware_ECC_Recovered on one of the drives seems like it might be a potential concern. I believe one of drives has that much more write usage because the array had to be rebuilt a while due to a human error (don't recall what I did, but no data was lost).

Those hardware ecc recovered values do not look bad at all for a seagate.

I had some chugging along in the mid thirties doing just fine. If the value stays stable for the life of the drive I would not be concerned.

I have a 2.5" 5Tb SMR drive I use for media storage on Win7, I use it as a media storage drive for MCE and it works just fine.

Its not as fast for file transfers as modern equals for sure but if it is for bulk file transfers and backup purposes then mine hasnt been a problem.