Seagate Barracuda ST5000LM000 5TB 2.5" Server Hard Drive 15mm 0.59" height OEM
Oct 10, 2021
SMR drives; Cheap storage, but slow for some workloads!
This is an SMR drive shucked from a cheap external drive. It's a great, very cheap way to fill 2.5 inch 15mm bays with a lot of storage. But know and understand what you are getting and your workload.
SMR drives are good at reads and sequential writes, and are very bad at random access writes because they have to re-write a lot of data even if all you do is change a few bytes in the middle of something. Good for media or one-time backups, but bad for incremental backups, lots of small files, or some filesystems like ZFS. They have part of the disk that works in a conventional way and then transfer it to the slower SMR section later on when they can. If you are using it sparingly enough that it can keep up, you won't even notice. But if you are hitting it hard with a workload it isn't good at, it will get really slow. Be aware. Know your workload before you buy.