[darkhelmet]

The tech behind SMR is intriguing to me, but I really don't want it anywhere near data that I consider important.

A lot of folks don't realize that SMR drives have a lot more in common with SSD firmware with its emulated virtual block layer and wear leveling than a traditional HDD. Having the same kind of virtual block layer is where the problems come from.

With SSDs, virtual blocks stored in pages that are about to be erased have to be relocated elsewhere. SMR drives have to do the same sort of thing but with sequential recording for the overlapping tracks. All the same nightmares exist including garbage collection/reclaimation, de-fragmentation, managing TRIM (or parsing NTFS data structures), etc etc. With SMR, handling the worst case scenarios are made more difficult by seek latency - something that isn't as much of an issue for SSD storage.

All of this tends to invalidate cherished assumptions that unix/linux file systems make about HDD storage. And that's ignoring the issues about the devices reaching timeout thresholds - again, the kinds of things that Windows is OK with but really hurts linux/unix systems.