Yeah, you don’t want a surveillance drive. They are optimized for continuous writes, not random IO.
It’s probably worth familiarizing yourself with the difference between CMR and SMR drives.
If you expect this to keep growing, it might make sense to switch to SAS now - then you can find some really cheap enterprise class drives on ebay that will perform a bit better in this type of configuration. You’d just need a cheap HBA (like a 9211-8i) and a couple breakout cables. You can use SATA drives with a SAS HBA, but not the other way around.
Oh. Seems this is a pattern.
I definitely don’t condone people telling you to kill yourself, but the fact that you are consistently receiving negative responses in an otherwise friendly community should give you pause: you’re missing a lot of clues. Unless you enjoy being ostracized like this, it might be time for a bit of serious introspection.
Oh no.
Unfortunately I have a lot of experience with this: attaching permanent array members via USB is a bad idea. OP, if it’s not too late, and assuming you haven’t already and decided to double down on yolo, I’d recommend reading about the downsides of this approach. It is easy to find relevant discussions (and catastrophes) in r/zfs.
Thunderbolt enclosures are a bit more expensive, but they won’t periodically fuck up your shit just because.
You cannot use rsync with Backblaze, nor zfs send | recv. If these are important to you, rsync.net might be worthwhile. That’s it, really.
So will I.