> Overall, I wish the drive vendors would expose some API to directly manage the SMR/CMR areas via software, just like the FLASH memory chips do. They do, on d

> Overall, I wish the drive vendors would expose some API to directly manage the SMR/CMR areas via software, just like the FLASH memory chips do. They do, on drive models that are sold to the customers large enough to have the resources to re-write their storage stack to handle zoned block devices. The drives sold at retail will continue to pretend to be ordinary random-access block devices for the sake of backwards compatibility.