DM-SMRs aren't good at sequential I/O. They're bad, just not pathologically bad. SMR drives still need to stage sequential I/O to the cache area, but they at le

DM-SMRs aren't good at sequential I/O. They're bad, just not pathologically bad. SMR drives still need to stage sequential I/O to the cache area, but they at least get to write it out without a ton of write amplification. With extra inefficiencies, yeah, SMR drives will only be a few times slower than regular drives for sustained sequential write workloads, as opposed to thousands of times slower for random writes. Real host-managed SMR with SMR aware filesystems and storage engines might be OK, but that's not a thing in the consumer space.