[Discuss] what are pros/cons of different (Linux) filesystems for use with SMR (shingled) hard drives?

[Dan Ritter]

Bill Bogstad wrote: 
> An external USB drive that I use solely for full and incremental
> backups is developing bad blocks. For pricing reasons, I'm going with
> a new drive which uses SMR for recording.   I backup with rsync and a
> hard link tree  for incrementals which means that file data is
> typically not overwritten at the file level.  Metadata of old files
> changes when a hard link in a new incremental is made to the
> preexisting file.   Are there any things I should watch out for this
> use case?   Particular filesystems that are either good or bad for SMR
> drives?  I obviously want the system to be reliable, but I doubt that
> making the system rewrite shingles over and over again due to frequent
> updates to the same disk blocks is good for the longevity of the
> drive.  Any info/opinions appreciated.

https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/SDC15_presentations/smr/HannesReinecke_Strategies_for_running_unmodified_FS_SMR.pdf

Super-short TL;DR: rsync is bad. Compressed tar files are good.
Big writes are good. Small writes are bad. ext4 can be coerced
into sorta doing a better job; btrfs ought to be better, but is
worse.

It's not the longevity of the disk which is the problem, it's
the fact that once you start updating data on the disk, it can
cause horrendously amazing write amplification and the disk will
be ridiculously slow as it tries to handle its housekeeping
tasks while writing your data.

Honestly? Don't do this. Black Friday is coming up, and Newegg
has committed that their pricing now is the same through the
beginning of December on BF sale items.

-dsr-