[mythtv-users] Anyone using Seagate 8T (ST8000AS0002) Hard Drives?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Wed, 9 Mar 2016 14:22:12 +1000, you wrote:

>On 9 March 2016 at 13:26, Kingsley Turner <krt at krt.com.au> wrote:
>
>> G'day,
>>
>> I've run out of space *again*...
>>
>> Is anyone using the Seagate 8T drives for MythTV ?
>>
>> I guess I should buy one today so they can release the 12T model tomorrow.
>>
>> cheers,
>> -kt
>>
>> There was a thread of this some time back
>
>http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/588148
>
>Basically the final result was these should be good for archiving but will
>perform slowly if rewritten due to their SMR based tech.
>
>videos would be a good example or a recording storage group which is not
>used for recording only playback.
>
>Hopefully the early kernel bugs have been worked out by now
>
>Cheers,
>
>Anthony

Yes, I have two of these, one for archiving videos, and one for
archiving recordings.  It would not be a good idea to use one for
recording directly to, as the write speed goes down to virtually zero
at times when it is doing its SMR re-writing.  My recording drive is
simply put in a new storagegroup I created called "Archives".  Any
recordings moved to this drive are able to be played and deleted
without problems, but it will never be recorded to unless I change a
recording rule to specifically refer to that drive.

I just manually moved all my oldest recordings files from my seven
normal recording drives to the archive drive.  I did an "ls -alt"
command on each recording drive, then copied all the file names for
recordings before a certain year into a file, and wrote a bash script
to move all those recording files to the archive drive.

However, there are a number of kernels where these "drive managed" SMR
drives do not work.  I am using Mythbuntu 14.04 LTS, currently with
3.13.0-79-generic kernel.  Kernels in that series or before are fine,
but all later ones I looked at had a bug in how they handled SMR
drives, resulting in timeout errors and the drive dropping offline in
the middle of a write.  The bug seems to be the result of work to
properly handle SMR drives, with drivers that handle their special
needs, but last time I looked (quite a while ago), it was still
broken.  I hope that the 4.3 or 4.4 kernel that is coming in Mythbuntu
16.04 LTS will have finally had the bug fixed - I am intending to
install 16.04 beta on my test PC shortly, so I should be able to find
out.