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There is considerable interest in shingled drives. These put data tracks so close together that you can't write to one track without clobbering the next. This may increase capacity by 20% or so, but results in write amplification problems. There is work underway on filesystems optimised for Shingled drives, for example see: https://lwn.net/Articles/591782/
Some shingled disks such as the Seagate 8TB archive have a cache area for random writes, allowing decent performance on generic filesystems. The disk can even be quite fast on some common workloads, up to round 200MB/sec writes. However, it is to be expected that if the random write cache overflows, the performance may suffer. Presumably, some filesystems are better at avoiding random writes in general, or patterns of random writes likely to overflow the write cache found in such drives.
Is a mainstream filesystem in the linux kernel better at avoiding the performance penalty of shingled disks than ext4?
There are 2 types of shingled disks in the market right now. Those that need a supported OS like the HGST 10TB disks vs those that do not need specific OS support like the Seagate 8TB Archive. Which are you referring to? – RJ- – 2015-08-25T01:33:47.970
Given that I am limiting the FS to mainstream ones, it would probably have to be a Seagate style? – gmatht – 2015-08-25T01:53:50.033
SMR as implemented in current drives does not result in "write amplification problems like SSDs". They only operate in very few ways vaguely like SSDs. – qasdfdsaq – 2015-08-25T16:17:48.867
@qasdfdsaq I meant "as with SSDs". – gmatht – 2019-05-09T03:08:39.090