Hard drives already present a fairly minimal abstraction over the underlying media. For most drives, it can't get any simpler unless the host system software wa

Hard drives already present a fairly minimal abstraction over the underlying media. For most drives, it can't get any simpler unless the host system software wants to get bogged down with media and vendor-specific details about things like error correction. For drives using Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), the storage protocols have already been extended to present a zoned storage model, so that drives don't have to be responsible for the huge read-modify-write operations necessary to make SMR behave like a traditional block storage device. I suspect these Host-Managed SMR drives are not equipped with the larger caches found on consumer drive-managed SMR hard drives.