SMR Drive for storing Plots? Is it ok for the long term farming?

Chia Farming & Harvesting
1

due to the price for 18TB or popular HDs, and also they are out of market now, is it ok to store plots on SMR drive? coz it’s cheaper and easy to find so far, especially those potable hd with 5TB space.

2

I don’t know much about this

But for storing / farming plots the required I/O is minimal, so I highly doubt it matters.

For plotting you want to use very fast drives like NVME or SSD.

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3

Just bumping this thread- ended up with 28 TB of SMR drives that are currently completely unusable.

I’m kinda amazed these made it into production, there is like zero support for them anywhere. I can’t even get it to mount in Ubuntu. Anyone have any tips?

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4

I was just looking into some drivers that are also SMR. When you say unusable, what do you mean? They’re just completely not firing up for you?

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5

There are host-managed and device-managed SMR drives.

Device-managed SMR drives present themselves to the OS as regular hard drives. They are bad for non-sequential writes, but for just farming/harvesting Chia they should be almost optimal.

Host-managed SMR drives need special software, as the OS has to manage the rewriting of the zones.

As far as I’m aware, the device-managed SMR drives for consumers are on the smaller capacity side, e.g. the WD Red series at 6TB and below, while host-managed SMR drives are available at higher capacity for data centres. Could be you ended up with some of those? Hard to tell without knowing the model.

Edit: that’s based on info from around last year, things may have changed since then.

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6

I’ve been using these Costco 8 TB external drives for plotting and they are device managed SMRs as far as I can tell.

Using Ubuntu for plotting and farming and haven’t run into any issues.

7

I would totally get SMR drives for storing my plots long-term. They are generally cheaper too. SMR firmware error correction is also better than found on CMR and PMR, except for good quality AI/NVR drives. Head reliability is also higher.

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I’m using the same thing and my stage 4 times are insane. Is there any way we could discord or something to walk me through what you’re doing. My stage 1-3 are so fast I don’t know if I should continue to tweak to max production or, reduce everything heavily because the drives are so slow.

9

I’m loving my little 5TB 2.5 inch Seagate Barracuda SMR drives. 0.85 watts on idle, and 1.9 watts during read !

I shuck them from Seagate “5TB Backup Plus Portable” usb drives.

(And Ubuntu has no problems with them.)

10

I will receive several WD 14 GB host managed SMR hard drive. Does windows 10 support it? Thanks!