Strategies for Using Standard File Systems on SMR Drives

SMR (shingled Media Recording) drives are posed to become the de facto standard for high-density disk drives. The technology behind these drives sets new challenges to existing storage stacks by introducing new concepts like strict sequential write ordering, zone management etc.

While the ultimate goal for SMR drives is to use a file system natively, currently none of the standard file systems can run without modifications.

In this presentations I'll be outlining a zone-based caching strategy and a remapping strategy for SMR drives. I will be presenting the advantages and disadvantages for each of these, and will be presenting a sample implementation under Linux.

Additionally I'll be presenting the results for running unmodified btrfs, xfs, and ext4 file systems using both of these strategies.

Learning Objectives

Problems for file systems on SMR drives
Strategies for using file systems on SMR drives
Advantages and disadvantages for each of these strategies