Martin Gregorie  wrote:
>
> Its interesting that the WD blurb on Elements portable USB drives
> basically says "the drive type inside is whatever we had in the stock bin
> when we did the production run", so either I got lucky, since mine seem
> to give fairly consistent backup times, or the current production policy
> was introduced after I got mine in early 2019.
>

AFAIK, SMR doesn't hurt performance until the drive starts re-writing
previously-used sectors, rather like flash. If your drives haven't
reached that point, they'll function roughly like CMR (also called PMR)
devices. Given the capacity of SMR drives, it might make sense to just
use them as approximately write-once devices.

Still, I'd like to figure out how to enable TRIM, which brings me back
to the issue of running the enclosure firmware updater, or determining
that TRIM is already enabled on the enclosure. It seems clear that the
disk and RaspiOS both support TRIM, it's just a matter of turning it on.

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

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