Question SMR external drive question

[dazzbee]

newbie here , i have 4TB wd my book i believe its SMR drive inside , i read smr drive bad for write and good for read
but i want to use this drive as frequently backup (once a months , more or less 100gb every backup) will doing this over time will make the drive become unusable (write limit) ? or takes forever to write?

thanks in advance

 

[Shmee]

I personally think SMR HDDs are bad in general, and would stay away. They are too slow. I also don't trust 2.5 in HDDs, or in general pre-built external drives. I prefer to buy a quality desktop drive, and use a USB dock or external enclosure with it.

Also, another option for you, if you only need a couple TB of backup space, would be to buy a 2TB SSD and put it in an enclosure. Much faster. SSDs are getting much cheaper now.

 

[00Logic]

SMR drives are 'write seldom' read often storage type drives.
They do have some non SMR space that transparently acts as a write cache for the drive, but not enough to write a large backup to.

When writing (even just 1 changed bit) to the drive it has to read the whole track/s into its RAM buffer, change the bit, and write all the data back.
That makes it especially slow for R4K I/O.
For a backup where it's one large compressed file; maybe not such a big issue because why bother to read the whole track if all the data's going to be changed anyway..?
Test and see.