> Hard drives that look like tapes. Tapes don't have fast (by spinning rust standards) random reads. Hinting in ext4 or NTFS is of course a waste of time, but

> Hard drives that look like tapes. Tapes don't have fast (by spinning rust standards) random reads. Hinting in ext4 or NTFS is of course a waste of time, but CoW filesystems like ZFS or btrfs are in a much better position to handle host-managed SMR. And a generic "SMRTL" layer that utilizes (hopefully mirrored) SSDs as a write staging area could do massively better than the dumb host-managed SMR on these drives.