must i consider zfs or lvm for smr large drive?
apologies for the subject header being kind of an opinion poll rather
than a question. but it is meant as a question.
until now, i have avoided lvm and zfs determinedly. i have always
been completely satisfied to copy some big partition rather than deal
with the complexity of those. i don't want to get confused about them
when i am debugging or setting up.
i use luks and ext4 and that's enough complexity for me. i get them
right, understand them, and glory in few corner cases.
i have a new 4tb portable external drive. i want it to have a huge partition.
even such things as resizing sound error-prone or complex. more
layers and commands to learn. and zfs is a whole new thing, with, oh,
yeah, you have to use contrib or non-free [can i rely on this being
secure and also available into the future?] and oh, yeah, it's
different from luks, and oh, yeah, do a balance/resilver/whatever.
yes, send/recv beckons.
but now i am thinking, with smr, the drive could pseudo-brick, despite
discard and fstrim. and i might then want to do some kind of, idk, dd
if=/dev/zero of=some-partition to "reset" it. and my 20gb root
partition might be too small for that.
i don't actually know if /dev/zero resets smr to stop shuffling. i am
just speculating.
but if it does, then i might want lvm's or zfs's resizing feature so
that i can do /dev/zero to some lo... gical ... volume? which would
then in my imagination reset smr and then the drive would work again
instead of 3.6tb filled non-writable.
idk if zfs/btrfs has smr features better than ext4 or vice-versa. i
do NOT need snapshotting, raid. my box is old and would not support
deduplication and i wonder if it would even support zfs at all at 6gb
which always gets filled up with firefox.
so, am i going to need one of these two
more-complex-than-luks-and-ext4 technologies just for safety when the
huge partition fills up? i know they are /desirable/ technologies for
those who like them.
but desirability is not the question at all. :) the question is, for
MY case, is lvm/zfs/btrfs? going to be needed for smr.
idk if i am on this mailing list.
preliminary comments below. :)
p.s.
as a preliminarty comment, i have partitioned it for booting, my idea
being for it to boot off of anything for quick perfectly-my-env
rescue, not for all the time use. i ahve accessibility issues that
make installing and rescue cd's problematic.]
as more preliminary, the thing does not boot on my old bios box no
matter what i try.
and yet more preliminary, it is toshiba canvio basics. it does
spindown or head parking at a ridiculously low delay. idk if hdparm
-y or -Y or scsi-spin or scsiadd or eject or idle3 or what is safest.
or if i should let it rack up those smartctl attrs.
and another. i am limited in computer use and have a very large
number of limitations that i cannot go into beause it would take too
much out of me to do so. i am not a normal kind of user. but i'd
still like gentle, helpful comments on my question if anybody has
some. i've seen issues with myself and others in the past [not on
this list] with "help" being used as a very transparent, quite obvious
excuse for being a rather extreme jerk, and i'd be interested in
knowing of some accepted things to say that say "thanks, but i do not
want 'help' from you personally at all but others are still very
welcome to contribute as i know already that they are sincere and
helpful" other than quitting the place entirely [at this point always
my best option]. the idea being to encourage sincere others to help
while getting others to realize i do not want help from the problem
person and that my not replying to the problem person does not mean
sincere others can't contribute, i/e/ the problem person has not
claimed accepted ownerhip over helping me and i am in no mood to be
attacked merely for asking a question or having accessibility and
other limitations or for no reason at all.
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