Well, no. SMR is not fine. What this debacle showed, very clearly, is that SMR collapses under some workloads. RAID rebuilds failed. Some took a week, but some

Well, no. SMR is not fine. What this debacle showed, very clearly, is that SMR collapses under some workloads. RAID rebuilds failed. Some took a week, but some just failed. Will my hard drive's workload ever resemble that of a NAS RAID rebuild? Or will there be another workload which breaks SMR drives? Key here is that workloads change, and weird issues like this one lead to compounding failures in emergencies. A system might have an SMR-friendly workload during it's normal operations, but during a cyberattack? When debugging an outage? It's impossible to predict what I'll be doing when the unexpected comes up. Above all else, I want my storage medium to be reliable and to not have issues like this. It's clear SMR drives aren't there yet. Yes, if there was a sufficiently advanced translation layer, or the right abstractions to the OS, SMR might be fine. But the present state-of-the-art of SMR technology is very obviously unsuitable for any application where you care about your data. I'll mention early SSDs were in a similar state many years ago, with wear leveling algorithms. But there was a difference in the level of transparency there.