'I still fail to understand how SMR could "remain active" after stopping and restarting the drive' – How else could rewriting reliably work in case of stopping and restarting the drive during the operation? The internal controller of the HDD is a tiny computer with firmware; and the main point of HDD is to be non-volatile memory. This means the HDD is able to journal the state of the operation and to resume later. I'm not saying this is what happened in your case; I'm only saying that resuming maintenance after power cycling is totally possible.
↧