I use a bunch of 8TB SMR Seagate Archive drives in a ZFS pool for backups and media storage.
I run ZoL, and honestly they've surprisingly been relatively solid drives. You can expect roughly 10-15MB/sec or so write throughput per drive, and latency is of course pretty bad. Across 24 spindles though, I haven't had too many complaints - it's archival storage and reads are fast enough for most use cases - about 50-70MB/spindle sustained for large files.
I would not try to say rsync millions of tiny files against this pool - it would not hold up well. However for it's use case - write large files once/read occasionally I'm quite happy - I just wish price would have come down over the course of 2 years as I had originally expected. You can expect to pay $200-220/drive even today, and that's what I paid the first batch when starting my pool.
Out of 24 total spindles I had 2 early failures (within 120 days of install) but otherwise no other failures. These drives were replaced hassle free via RMA. My I/O pattern is pretty light - probably 100GB written per day across 24 spindles, and maybe 1TB read.
Basically if you try to do anything but streaming writes you're going to have a bad time. They are a bit more forgiving on the read side of the fence however. Don't expect these things to break any sort of speed records!
If I were buying today I wouldn't buy 8TB SMR - I'd pay the $20-30/spindle premium for standard drives. I'd have to look at the 14TB costs to see if the huge speed tradeoff would be worth it. When I first started using them, the cost per GB was compelling enough to give it a shot and I'm pretty happy with the results.
These are drive-managed SMR, so no special drivers needed. I agree they are ideal for write-once/read-many media servers :)
Today I'm not sure the 8TB drives make any sense as prices have come down so far on regular 5400rpm slower drives that are much faster. These new 14TB spindles will be interesting to keep an eye on.
I imagine SMR won't really take off, if it does I'd expect more direct kernel/driver support for the hardware. Drive-managed SMR is always going to be exceedingly inefficient.
I run ZoL, and honestly they've surprisingly been relatively solid drives. You can expect roughly 10-15MB/sec or so write throughput per drive, and latency is of course pretty bad. Across 24 spindles though, I haven't had too many complaints - it's archival storage and reads are fast enough for most use cases - about 50-70MB/spindle sustained for large files.
I would not try to say rsync millions of tiny files against this pool - it would not hold up well. However for it's use case - write large files once/read occasionally I'm quite happy - I just wish price would have come down over the course of 2 years as I had originally expected. You can expect to pay $200-220/drive even today, and that's what I paid the first batch when starting my pool.
Out of 24 total spindles I had 2 early failures (within 120 days of install) but otherwise no other failures. These drives were replaced hassle free via RMA. My I/O pattern is pretty light - probably 100GB written per day across 24 spindles, and maybe 1TB read.
Basically if you try to do anything but streaming writes you're going to have a bad time. They are a bit more forgiving on the read side of the fence however. Don't expect these things to break any sort of speed records!
If I were buying today I wouldn't buy 8TB SMR - I'd pay the $20-30/spindle premium for standard drives. I'd have to look at the 14TB costs to see if the huge speed tradeoff would be worth it. When I first started using them, the cost per GB was compelling enough to give it a shot and I'm pretty happy with the results.