Thanks Al.

I was running an SMR and CMR RAID 1for a few days while I waited for an SMR drive (the Seagate Barracuda). There's a whole long story about getting ripped off on ebay for the two drives I never got, but one other guy. who cancelled on me, sent me one drive anyways for some reason that I'll never know. And I paid him for it.

So, yeah, I resilvered a new SMR drive that arrived first and ran that SMR/CMR pair in RAID 1. The rebuild took about 15 hours, but that's what I experienced with the two CMR drives a few times. Wow, maybe something was wrong with those drives since I rebuilt like 3 different times in a period of 8 years.

When I got the second SMR drive I put it in the cage and resilvered it using the first SMR as the Master. And that took about 15 hours.

I'm trying to limp an 8 year old Dell XPS desktop another 5 years and set a world's record, so I'm kinda stuck for the moment. Besides I've got my important data in the cloud, so I'm not that concerned other than losing some data (code) that's on GitHub that is not in the cloud.

If I can limp along it will be interesting to see what choices there are 5 years from now. Will I have some cheap super-dumb terminal to a virtual desktop in the cloud? I could do that. And the circle will be complete. I'll finish my computing life on a dumb terminal.