I once (about 10y ago) experienced hardware that got tired. A customer replaced the usual hard disks with shiny new Seagate SMR drives, because they had more storage capacity. Funny thing is that they could not handle the sustained 100MB/s we were feeding them. So after about 20 minutes they started slowing down and after half an hour they stopped working for about 20 minutes and then they were fine again. Obviously the customer complained about our storage product and forgot to mention this small fact. Once we figured it out we had good laugh.
That's interesting. My old server about 10 years ago had a Seagate black which died. I replaced it with a Seagate green. I notice things started slowing down and down when the disc writes got heavy. It could freeze up for minutes at a time, then recover without any errors. It took me weeks to realise what was happening because… Because I don't actually know why. In hindsight it was obvious. Maybe the Seagate green was a SMR drive. Either way, it was nasty and caused a lot of frustration.
A quick check just now and it seems that the Seagate green were SMR. Fuckers never put that on the box did they. Bastards.
I bought one of the first versions of those shiny Seagate SMR drives, specifically to store my (encrypted) backups. It failed after a couple of months, so I returned it and got a replacement. Which failed after a couple of months. So I joined the large chorus of "I'll never buy Seagate again".
