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This question is mostly result of theoretical musements of some IT guy who had to deal with cheap home security system and search for CMR HDD for it. It is asked purely out of curiosity.

The concept of SMR itself seems to allow continuous write with no interruptions, so, it should be suitable for some applications, such as overwritable video storage of security systems.

What you need to do is to erase storage zone by zone, instead of file by file, and write data continuously in single pass until shingled zone is full. Yet there I am, looking for CMR disk.

What is general state of "proper" SMR HDD support? Are there software implementations able to fully utilize SMR quirks? Like, at all, any kind of software? Drivers support? File Systems? Services (databases, etc)? End User software?

Small research gives some mentions of ZBC/ZAC protocols for management of such disks, but also about its limitations of those protocols.

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    I wonder if there's a confusion between host managed SMR and regular SMR. Regular SMR doesn't need special software support. Its just slower than CMR in many cases, and some NAS and RAID setups, notably ZFS do not perform well on it. Host managed SMR... well I've not been able to work out if you can just take a disk and get it to work on a normal PC. In theory, it wouldn't have some of the problems of normal SMR but you'd need to get it to work first. Commented Dec 6 at 7:43
  • I mean, yes, the slower speed is the price for transparent support of SMR HDDs without altering already implemented APis. System is unaware of its specific geometry, and because the file system is historically managed on system's side, HDD itself is not aware of file system to attempt to optimize performance on level of separate files. Commented Dec 6 at 9:48
  • It seems like at least some consumer SMR disks support some kind of interface to communicate with host and operate at level of shingled zones. I see mentions of RocksDB (database), which uses ZenFS capable of aligning files with shingled areas, but looks like this the only host-aware software? github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/zenfs Commented Dec 6 at 9:48

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