I am considering adding an 8TB Archive drive to my CentOS 7 server. It would be used to backup the two 4TB drives already in the server. From my reading it appears that Seagate has isolated the SMR technology from the operating system so that the drive appears to be a "normal" drive. I am finding next to nothing about using these drives with Linux.

I did find one discussion which seemed to indicate that when the drive was transferring a slug of data from the cache area to a shingled track the SATA bus would "stall" and the kernel would interpret this as an error. The discussion indicated that this was a bug with 3.19+ kernels so I am not sure if/how it would impact CentOS 7 if this bug was even the issue.

Anyhow... has anyone got one of these beasts running in their system?

TIA,

Ken

Quite a long thread on Arch that suggests issues with this may have been fixed in 4.4+ kernels - here. Read the linked kernel bug thread referenced near the end as well.

I think I will stick with "traditional" hard drives for now. The cost/TB is similar.

Thanks,

Ken