APFS on a Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) Hard Drive

[sumo.do]

Has anyone got experience (pos or neg) with running APFS on an SMR hard drive. For example the common USB 3.0 Seagate Backup Plus Hub 8TB is an SMR drive. I know HFS+ is probably safer, but has anyone tried APFS on these type of drives? Note, I am not looking for the merits of running APFS on a platter drive. There are many posts on that. I am looking at SMR drives specifically. I suspect APFS may cause it to run slower than HFS+ as the SMR drives are slower and rewrite a lot. Any comments?

 

[komatsu]

Don't store important data on immature technologies such as APFS and SMR.

This is like trying out a new type of bio-fuel powered jet-engine AND a new type of experimental wing on the same aircraft.

Me don't want to fly on that plane...

Give me a tried-and-tested B767 or A330.

 

[sumo.do]

Don't store important data on immature technologies such as APFS and SMR.

This is like trying out a new type of bio-fuel powered jet-engine AND a new type of experimental wing on the same aircraft.

Me don't want to fly on that plane...

Give me a tried-and-tested B767 or A330.

Yeah... thanks... I was looking more for empirical evidence based on actual experience as opposed to a random opinion with an extreme example. I don't mean to be facetious, but you wrote it.

Has anyone actually run APFS on an SMR drive? I am interested to know given the drives are very common. I am mainly interested in knowing if there is noticeable issues.

 

[lord.dwarf]

Here is my experience of using SMR HDD for backup.

HDD:
Western Digital My Passport 5TB WDBPKJ0050BBK-WESN 2.5" USB 3.0 External Black.

File system:
APFS (case-insensitive, i.e. default).

Backup:
2.5T of photos, videos, movies, books and small source code / lib files

Backup was made during the recent week, by means of copying portions of data in ~5-8 steps from my MBP (2018, Big Sur 11.5.2). The HDD itself was absolutely new, it was never attached to any computer besides the MBP. Upon detaching the drive, I've always waited till the drive have been ejected from Finder, however I've noticed that this HDD was almost always spinning after ejection, and thus sometimes clicked when USB detached. Also, there was recently a single occurrence of a shutdown/crash of MBP, when I once attached both of my external HDDs (not very long before The result).

The result:

when attaching the HDD, the message is displayed:
macOS can't repair the disk "My Passport 5TB".
You can still open or copy files on the disk, but you can't save changes to files on the disk. Back up the disk and reformat it as soon as you can.

Troubleshooting:

1. Disk Utility's First Aid process fails, first errors are:
error: (oid 0x402) apfs: _omap_lookup_obj(0x402, 0x0): No such file or directory
Volume superblock is invalid.

2. DriveDx's SMART status for HDD is OK regarding all parameters.

3. I've decided to re-format HDD from APFS to HFS+, and try again. In a case of issues, I will switch to a new HDD, presumably non-SMR.

 

[theorist9]

Necro'd reply, but if you're still interested in this question, there's now more data on it:

Choosing a backup drive - Bombich Software

bombich.com

 

[gilby101]

I've decided to re-format HDD from APFS to HFS+, and try again

HFS+ is less resilient than APFS in the event of sudden power loss, crashes, etc. But maybe you will have more luck. Part of the problem with SMR is that the drive itself has work to do tidying things up AFTER macOS has successfully finished with the drive. Makes it hard to trust ejection as being safe.

If it were me, I would replace the drive. If you need bus powered or portability get an SSD. For an HDD, get a powered one and not SMR.