Zoned storage (SMR) drive end-user opacity

Posted May 26, 2023 15:13 UTC (Fri) by Hobart (subscriber, #59974)
Parent article: Zoned storage and filesystems

Has anyone found a consumer SMR drive that even tells the device owner what the status of its SMR behavior is?

There's been protocol support for years - IIRC Ted T'so had a patch set for extfs to interact with them in a more optimal way - but IDK if any HD manufacturer has actually made that available to the end user.

Zoned storage (SMR) drive end-user opacity

Posted Jun 5, 2023 5:34 UTC (Mon) by faramir (subscriber, #2327) [Link]

I tried to figure this out at one point and it seems the issue is:

Drive Managed SMR (consumer drives) vs. Host Managed SMR (enterprise drives).

Consumer SMR (DM) drives don't implement the protocol and who knows what their
firmware is doing underneath. Some people say that they do something like modern SSD
drives (TLC or QLC) which use part of the flash as 'pseudo-SLC' caches in order to provide
a fast write cache which might eventually be moved to TLC/QLC when the SSD gets less busy.
So part of a DM SMR drive might actually not be SMR. Also, the algorithms involved are almost
certainly considered vendor proprietary. It's not even clear it would be reasonable for a DM SMR
drive to attempt to say anything to the Host as it might change it's layout on the fly.

Or at least the above was my take away before I gave up on the subject.