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Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS?

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On 2026-01-03, Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> On 2026-01-03, Lars Poulsen wrote:
>
>> On 2026-01-03, Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>> On 2026-01-03, Lars Poulsen wrote:
>>>
>>>> A month ago I decided that I needed to replace the hardware under my
>>>> Linux Server/Workstation. As I was gaming out the migration, I realized
>>>> that the hard drives were 10-15 years old, and SMART declared them to
>>>> be "Pre-Fail - Old Age", so I bought a couple of new 2TB Seagate
>>>> Barracuda drives [...]
>>
>>> Where is the CMR cut-off in Seagate's Barracuda offering, between 1 and
>>> 2 TB or between 2 and 3 TB?
>>
>> Oh, the things I don't know. I had to look up CMR. (It's like "organic
>> farming"- we used to just call it "farming".)
>>
>> https://www.seagate.com/products/cmr-smr-list/
>>
>> Branding is tricky. I thought that "Barracuda" was a premium brand,
>> but apparently that no longer applies. The good stuff is now "Barracuda
>> Pro".
>>
>> "Barracuda Pro" is all CMR, up to 10TB and above.
>> Plain "Barracuda" is SMR (shingled recording) from 2TB and up,
>> i.e. it is now a "consumer" brand.
>
> Oh, that looks even worse than I thought, I misremembered.
>
> If you're using these on a NAS, I guess that unless they're old enough
> to be CMR, or you have some plan to handle SMR, or certainty that it
> won't be an issue, you probably want to return these and get CMR ones if
> possible.
>
> Even without NAS, there will be performance degradation. With NAS and
> RAID, one issue that broke out with Western Digital not disclosing the
> SMR nature of drives (and worse, branding some of them as appropriate
> for such uses?) is that the slowness may be perceived as a drive failure
> in such systems.
>
> I've read people explain (on the gentoo-user mailing-list, IIRC) that
> one can take advantage of SMR if it's host-managed, besides there being
> filesystems more adequate for use with SMR. But, unless this is part of
> your plan, it's probably better to avoid it?

I thought I had done some homework by asking Edge AI to compare field
operational qualities between WD and Seagate. The answers never
mentioned CMR vs SMR. I did not open the boxes yet, so I could send
them back to Amazon and postpone the physical rebuild for another
week, must that feels like procrastination.

I am hoping that newer drives will have onboard firmware that do ECC
correction, error counting and remapping, so that I can monitor it
and catch degradation with SMARTCTL. Is that realistic?

Two replace two 2TB SMR drives with either two 4TB will double the
price of the new drives.

    2TB Barracuda       $71
    4TB Barracuda      $193
    14TB Barracuda Pro $400

And there are and endless variation of Seagate HDD brands:
- Constellation
- Enterprise Capacity
- Pipeline
- Skyhawk Lite
- Skyhawk
- Skyhawk SV
- Skyhawk Pro
- Ironwolf
- Ironwolf Pro
    .. and more. But while the Skyhawk are mostly CMR, they are
advertized SOLELY for video surveillance applications and with
data recovery algoriths that allow repairs of glitches in video
data, so I would not touch them for my general purpose storage.
While the non-pro Barracudas and Ironwolf are supposed to have 4TB
variants, those seem not to be available on Amazon right now,
except as "renewed", and I don't think I'd want that.
-- 
Lars Poulsen - an old geek in Santa Barbara, California

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Thread

Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> - 2026-01-03 01:04 +0000
  Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2026-01-03 02:23 +0100
    Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> - 2026-01-02 21:16 -0500
  Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2026-01-03 02:00 +0000
    Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> - 2026-01-02 22:20 -0500
      Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2026-01-03 12:28 +0000
        Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> - 2026-01-03 08:07 -0500
    Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> - 2026-01-03 14:09 +0000
      Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2026-01-03 18:06 +0000
        Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> - 2026-01-03 20:20 +0000
      Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-01-03 22:07 +0000
        Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2026-01-03 22:45 +0000
          Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-01-03 23:12 +0000
            Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2026-01-04 04:39 +0000
              Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-01-04 04:53 +0000
              Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? Bobbie Sellers <bliss-sf4ever@dslextreme.com> - 2026-01-03 21:10 -0800
                Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2026-01-04 06:20 +0000
                Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2026-01-06 12:42 +0100
              Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2026-01-04 06:13 +0000
        Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2026-01-04 01:26 +0000
          Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2026-01-04 06:24 +0000
  Re: Rebuilding Linux Workstation/Server - and building a NAS? Pancho <Pancho.Jones@protonmail.com> - 2026-01-03 08:28 +0000

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