"b) no easy way for the software guys to address the problem" Right, from a techical perspective, that is the problem. If WD was transparent about the SMR regi

"b) no easy way for the software guys to address the problem" Right, from a techical perspective, that is the problem. If WD was transparent about the SMR regions, cache size/full capacity, and read/write timeouts then the drives could be made provably useful (if potentially slow). But they aren't providing that, which is problem 1, your "c" is of course a large part of that problem (lack of transparency). At least intel when they product segment, they tell you what is visibly diffrent between the products (ECC, AVX-512, number of UPI lanes, etc). WD and the drive industry has been trying to hide this information for decades, for a while it was the sonic interference functionality, then it was TLER controls, then the IDLE3 controls. And recently its hard to get a straight answer about things which can be detected from profiling tools (SMR, Rotational speed, number of platters, track to track seek, etc). And for what? The only people being hurt by this are the consumers, which don't know if they should buy a WD purple or a WD red for their video server because no one but their actual competitors spends the time/effort to take the drives apart and profile them to detect what is actually different in the artificial product segments.