I stopped buying WD after they slapped the Red label on their SMR drives. I’m sure there are good uses for them, but being a member of a RAID ain’t one.
I run a bunch of Seagate 8TB SMR bought a few months after release, and the ZFS raidz2 pool has grown over the years.
They are wonderful for write once/read many storage of large files. Due the the sheer number of drives the write speed isn’t a major concern as it can saturate the 20gbps Ethernet bond to the machine.
Reads are the multi-GB/sec range though, so long as they are sequential.
They would not be my first choice, but for specific uses like backups and media storage they are a good value.
For low usage like on a NAS ,they are fine for me because they usually last me about 5 years. Maybe more if I don’t replace them for larger versions. They’re about $50 cheaper than other better performing models. They’ve also outlasted every seagate drive I’ve had in the same size and price category. Of course I would never use them for anything other than a NAS.
For low speed writes -- e.g. trying to download things over the internet say and then save them off, but not for trying to backup multi terabyte data to it.
If they increased the size to 4TB say, to make it easier to import data to it, it might be worth it. But if it takes several days to write 32GB of data to it, it's not really gonna be worth it to most people.
I've wondered why WD/Seagate don't invest in a consumer solution where drives are literally just plug and play together and give you raid without the hassle of a raid controller or software. Eg. An 8TB drive connected to an 8TB drive is a mirrored raid. SMR drives would serve as "cold storage". Once written to, would never be rewritten again.
That'd be a leap from USB/SATA/sas native chips to a full blown nix os with a microcontroller and secondary bus on it to handle drive to drive.
if you want that I think they do have in box solutions with two or more drives and a while back sold their own NAS drive system. Not sure what they have today but there are plenty of free or free enough solutions out there these days.
FYI all modern hard drives have multi-core ARM or Risc-V microprocessors built-in. Usually one core manages the motor control and signal decode from the RW head and another core runs an embedded OS and manages the data interface to the host computer. Folks have managed to get malware running on the hard drive's embedded CPU(s)[0] as well as full blown Linux distributions [1]. So your average hard drive definitely already has enough grunt to get the job done. Just needs a firmware written to expose the functionality.
I think what's important is that most SMR drives can only write a few MB per second anyway once their buffer gets saturated. That's well within wifi/100M ethernet speeds.
I feel like 10gb superspeed hardware is more than a fast enough connection. The hardware is relatively cheap to build, it's just the software.
I'm not saying you need a super high speed processor or memory either, since the SMR drive itself can serve can serve as (slow) memory for the CPU. The trick is trying to figure out mostly how to replicate blocks across the raid, and then mapping the files to raid blocks.
