SMR drive for a mirror

[tibblist]

Is it possible to use an SMR drive effectively in a mirror or pool of mirrored vdevs? Will the quicker rebuild time if a drive fails negate how generally slow the writes can be? This pool would mainly be used as a backup so it wouldn't have consistent writes. The drives in question are seagate 8TB ST8000DM004 drives. They are so cheap on eBay I could even see mirroring 3 drives together for extra security if needed.

 

[Arwen]

Seagate SMR drives don't have the fatal error bug that appears to exist in the WD Red SMRs, when used with ZFS. (ZFS tries to bundle reads, even for sectors it's not written. WD Red SMR drives think this is an error, and basically fail.)

But, keep in mind they get slower with time.

I do use a Seagate 8TB SMR, (bought years ago), as a backup target for my FreeNAS. It's worked perfectly fine with ZFS for what it is. But, it's not fast, and has slowed with time.