SMR Drive - Badblocks 2nd pass still going strong at 160-180 MB/s (debunking bad reputation)
Since I've been constantly hearing how bad SMR drives are I figured I'd give the Seagate Expansion Desktop 8TB a go since it was on sale for 139 bucks instead of the regular 179.
Especially since it uses only 4x2 Tab Platters without Helium (repairable). I have to say its quite silent compared to my older Disks so far. Which suprises me a bit. Temperatures seem also below the Helium drives, which sounds logical looking that it has way less Platters and Read-Heads.
Keep in mind I've yet to shrugg it - I'm testing it over USB3 in its enclosure esclusively right now.
I've already written over 11.5 TB to it in the spawn of 64 hours ... so far yet to notice any slowdowns to single MB/s. The lowest it has gotten was approximately 60 MB/s after f3write, which settled itself after about 1 hour then it was back to full speed again.
Approx 2.5 TB of those were with it being formated with btrfs an f3write - btrfs scrub reported zero errors errors. Speed dropped down to 80 MB/s write most likely due to the nature of f3write (not being coded for HDDs but flash storage).
Now I'm going to the second pass of badblocks - after filling the whole capacity once and its still going strong at ~180 MB/s.
After that will follow a long smart test and the extended openSeaChest test (the open-source successor of SeaTools professional for Linux).
So far only the short smart test and short openSeaChest test went trought without errors.
Posted Feb 17, 2019, 1:09 PM UTC · edited