You don’t need to write the entire drive sequentially with SMR, it’s just that you need to write sequentially within a given “chunk” of data. So there are some

You don’t need to write the entire drive sequentially with SMR, it’s just that you need to write sequentially within a given “chunk” of data. So there are some workloads that can, at least in theory, work on SMR. Think of object storage or log-structured data.