If SMR isn't ideal for growing nodes... could it still work for parked ones?

If you filled say a 8TB node on a regular CMR drive… then shut it down and moved it all-at-once to a 8TB SMR HDD… would you expect it to still perform OK (since it’s not still growing at 500-1000GB/month)?

Or would the small churn of trash->new-ingress still cause problems?

I am running a node on a 6TB Seagate SMR drive for years now. Filewalker takes a lot of time, but so far it runs fine.

I think there are differences in how good different models perform. Some might work, others not so well…

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I feel it will work fine: amount of churn would correlated with current deletion rate, and people complain about how long it takes to reduce the node size – specifically because of the slow churn. So I’d say, it’s well within the capability of the smr disk to absorb.

However copying your data to that disk will take a while… I’d say, at least a week, if cloning the disk. Which means you can’t clone it – you’ll have to keep the node online, and take the multiple rsync approach. How many months will that take I won’t try to guess.

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As both are 8TB, the easiest would be to use a copy Station which would take only 2 or 3 days.

And for SMR I would ever move DBs on SSD and then its fine.

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SMR usually does quite okay with sequential writes, therefore dd / cloning would be the more attractive option. Most of them have a sequential speed of 100-150MB/s, boiling down to less than 24 hours offline for a 8TB drive. That’s not so bad…

Rsync / cp / robocopy on the other hand…

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I would run a full optimisation on the cmr, with ultradefrag or so and then clone it.

Umm take bets what happens first, problems or drive dying? Id say 50/50