&gt; Just creating a filesystem on an 8TB disk takes hours.<p>Am I being dense here, but why would you create a filesystem on the hard drive?  The hard drive should only store file contents.<p>There&#x27;s all kinds of seeking and syncing and random access needed for the filesystem.  Seeks from file contents can&#x27;t be avoided, but ones due to the filesystem can be.<p>If there&#x27;s no metadata-on-ssd + data-on-disk filesystem for Linux, there should be.