I show how to test if a drive is SMR using FIO in Linux. SMR drives can be much slower in some workloads and are often not labeled well, so this is easy to use method that will easily show if a drive is smr or not. This test can run on any systems with FIO, and I use a Fedora 32 install as a example. It can also run from a live disk.

Here is the command I used to test the drives

sudo fio —name=smrtest —direct=1 —readwrite=randwrite —bs=1M —iodepth=4 —filename=/dev/sdb

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