These are drive-managed SMR, so no special drivers needed. I agree they are ideal for write-once/read-many media servers :) Today I'm not sure the 8TB drives

These are drive-managed SMR, so no special drivers needed. I agree they are ideal for write-once/read-many media servers :) Today I'm not sure the 8TB drives make any sense as prices have come down so far on regular 5400rpm slower drives that are much faster. These new 14TB spindles will be interesting to keep an eye on. I imagine SMR won't really take off, if it does I'd expect more direct kernel/driver support for the hardware. Drive-managed SMR is always going to be exceedingly inefficient.