pretty sure trim is mainly an ssd thing, a regular hdd doesn’t have to prep an area for write, while an ssd does, thus when doing a trim areas containing old data is zeroed out so that doesn’t have to be done when a write is incoming.
hdd’s just rewrite directly, doesn’t matter if it was empty or contained data in advance…
or atleast thats my understanding of it… so in that case trim in the sense of what ssd’s does can never be a thing for hdd’s unless if its some sort of hybrid…
ofc SMR aka shingled are sort of a weird technology which writes multiple lines of data on the platter overlapping… i suppose on an empty SMR drive its possible to do something similar to the difference between SLC,MLC,TLC,QLC and so on an so forth.
ofc that just offsets the rewrites for later and thus creates more workload but improves burst speeds, however for something like a storagenode it’s not really going to help…
a continuous load especially if at a level near max performance will generally make everything slower, even trim on an ssd would create extra latency, if the ssd wasn’t practically idle most of the time…
haven’t read the link, but yeah i’m sure there are lots of tricks to make SMR perform better, but trim doesn’t really improve performance, it does workloads in advance and thus can react faster during burst loads… so it would inherently always come at a overall performance loss…
i do use trim myself on all my ssd’s, and it’s magnificent, gives me about 30% better performance, pretty sure there is some sort of performance penalty for that, but not sure how great it is on ssd’s.
but for hdd’s i don’t see it as being very viable, aside from burst writes on SMR.
so maybe… but i doubt it…