The funny thing is that SMR is perfect for storing large immutable files like photos, music, videos or game resources. What we need is a controlled way of relaying the SMR properties further up the chain. Anything that is “drive managed” is bound to fall apart sooner rather than later. I have the first Seagate 8TB SMR “Archive” HDD, and I have yet to find a way to tell the controller to “TRIM” the complete drive and start over. Without this SMR-drives essentially become WORM-drives.

The “read-modify-write” nature of copy-on-write file systems are a perfect marriage with “host managed SMR”. There was a couple of sessions on SMR during the OpenZFS summit: “Host aware SMR” [1] and “HGST SMR” [2]

[1] : https://openzfs.org/w/images/2/2a/Host-Aware_SMR-Tim_Feldman... and https://youtu.be/b1yqjV8qemU [2] : https://youtu.be/a2lnMxMUxyc