Nostr Web Client

Question among geeks.

Is there any way to use an SMR HDD for Proxmox backups with relatively decent speed?

Here's what I've tried so far:

Mount options in fstab:

- defaults,noatime,nodiratime,nofail

Tests performed:

BTRFS: Starts off very well with a sustained 100MB/s, but at 200 gigabytes it drops to 3/4 MB/s.

XFS: Starts with a sustained 10/15MB/s and at 200 gigabytes ends up dropping to 3/4MB/s.

EXT4: Starts and ends with 3/4MB/s.

I'm ruling out NILFS2 because I don't consider it mature enough.

SMR technology is fucking shit.

No practical way for decent sustained speed on host-managed SMR.

CMR zones are only ~100-200GB. After that, every backup rewrite hits random RMW penalty → 3-4MB/s forever.

Only workarounds (still slow):

ZFS with sync=disabled + huge volblocksize (1M) + SLOG on SSD → ~20-30MB/s max

Front with SSD cache (L2ARC or bcache/writeback)

Bottom line: SMR is unusable for Proxmox backups unless you cache it aggressively with SSD. Buy CMR or archive-tier drive instead.

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Thanks for the information 😢

Honestly, it was my mistake. I didn't expect a WD Black to be SMR.