Does anybody have experience/ideas regarding the use of TRIM with
SMR hard drives? I recently discovered I own one, and would like to
make the best of a bad (and increasingly unavoidable) situation.

According to the tests at
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/enabling-trim-on-external-ssd-on-raspber
ry-pi
it appears that trim is supported, but turned off on my (default) RaspiOS
installation:

bob@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo fstrim -v /
[sudo] password for bob:
fstrim: /: the discard operation is not supported
bob@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo lsblk -D
NAME   DISC-ALN DISC-GRAN DISC-MAX DISC-ZERO
sda           0        0B       0B         0
sda1        0        0B       0B         0
sda2        0        0B       0B         0
sda3        0        0B       0B         0
bob@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo sg_vpd -p bl /dev/sda | grep unmap
  Maximum unmap LBA count: 65535
  Maximum unmap block descriptor count: 8
  Optimal unmap granularity: 0 blocks [not reported]
bob@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo sg_vpd -p lbpv /dev/sda | grep Unmap
  Unmap command supported (LBPU): 1

Since SMR hard drives suffer the same convolutions as SSDs during writes,
it seems useful to employ TRIM. Does anybody know if this is true?

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

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