[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="jkniiv"
 avatar="http://cdn.libravatar.org/avatar/05fd8b33af7183342153e8013aa3713d"
 subject="comment 15"
 date="2023-12-12T19:25:16Z"
 content="""
The fact of the matter is that HDDs have gotten shittier during the past decade or so because most of them
(except for sizes above 8TB and drives meant for the enterprise) already employ SMR (shingled magnetic recording)
instead of conventional recording techniques. It seems SMR is poison to all sorts of workloads having
small files and directories being rewritten (not that drives employing it have sequential speeds that are exactly
stellar either) like what git and git-annex are doing under the hood. I bought an 6TB WD Elements desktop drive recently
(knowingly an SMR unit because non-SMR HDDs are rather expensive here in Finland) as an git-annex archival drive and I was
flabbergasted at how slow it turned out for merely syncing git metadata. I'm on Windows and have to use adjusted-unlocked
branches so there's that but NTFS on Windows is not terribly slow -- maybe not as speedy as Linux filesystems but it caches
metadata rather well, so it's ok. The problem is that while my 4TB Seagate IronWolf non-SMR drive (git-annex) syncs
in a minute or two, my new 6TB takes a minimum of *ten* minutes or so to do that. At this point I have just resigned myself
to the fact that all my future archival drives where I use regular git remotes will be slow as molasses. I'd love to own
big, fast non-SMR enterprise drives but those will be outside my budget for years to come, I'm afraid. :/
"""]]
