alt Hacker NewsI'm surprised Backblaze doesn't use host-managed SMR. I would expect that they'd already write data sequentially for speed and have different storage tiers (for "hot" data likely to be changed/deleted soon vs. data expected to stay for a long time). At least for large files in the cold tier SMR would make a lot of sense.
Replies
walrus01 • today at 3:31 AM
Until very recent price changes, at the scale that they purchase hard drives, I don't think that there would have been significant cost savings in purchasing SMR drives. Particularly after taking into account the additional hours of software development required to write custom host managed SMR stuff to deal with the performance problems.
I'm also surprised, others in the industry have been using SMR for 7+ years at this point, it's hardly new and untrusted technology!
https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/smr-what-we-learned-in-o...