Question Using an external SMR HDD for frequent backups ?

[Indra_1]

newbie here , i have 4TB wd my book i believe its SMR drive inside , i read smr drive bad for write and good for read
but i want to use this drive as frequently backup (once a months , more or less 100gb every backup) will doing this over time will make the drive become unusable (write limit) ? or takes forever to write?

thanks in advance

 

[helpstar]

Only the write speed is not that fast and the recovery of data deleted or quick formatted would be problematic. Raid might not work with other drives not being SMR.

Durability is not a real problem in my opinion for backups. Keep in mind that every storage can fail.

 

[Misgar]

If you're only running a backup once a month, don't worry about the USB drive being (potentially) SMR. I doubt you'll detect any subtle slowing down when blocks of tracks are being re-written. If you're using an SMT hard drive for real-time video editing, you'd be better off with a CMR/PMR hard disk, or better still an M.2 NVMe SSD,

https://www.howtogeek.com/803276/cmr-vs.-smr-hard-drives-whats-the-difference/

The whole SMR/PMR saga kicked off a few years ago when users of FreeNAS/TrueNAS on the Serve The Home forum discovered that WD were hiding the fact that some of their "so-called" NAS compatible Red hard disks were SMR.

https://www.servethehome.com/surreptitiously-swapping-smr-into-hard-drives-must-end/

WD's deliberate obfuscation about SMR didn't matter in most RAID systems, but FreeNAS was particularly badly affected. When you replace a failed drive in a FreeNAS build with an SMR drive, it can take days instead of hours to "resilver" the array. In many cases the FreeNAS rebuild would time out with SMR drives.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...smr-disks-arent-great-but-theyre-not-garbage/