[mbjorling]

Half of the world bits from HDDs are estimated to be on SMR in 2023 - the gains are significant when deploying at scale.

For SSDs, it gets even more fun as zones aligns with the characteristics of the media and you get this effect of significant increase in capacity (20% with a 28% OP drive), order of magnitude reduction in dram, and eliminates device side garbage collection on the drive (commonly between >1-5), which improves the QoS considerably.

Additionally, one can now run the drives at 100% capacity utilization - conventional drives becomes slower due to increasing device write amplification.