Write speeds on SMR drives start to stagnate after mere gigabytes written, not after terabytes. As soon as the CMR cache is full, you’re fucked, and it stagnates to utterly unusable speeds as it’s desperately trying to balance writing out blocks to the persistent area of the disk and accepting new incoming writes. I have 25 year old consumer level IDE drives that perform better than an SMR drive in this thrashing state.

Also, I often use hard drives as a temporary holding area for stuff that I’m transferring around for one reason or another and that absolutely sucks if an operation that normally takes an hour or two is suddenly becoming a multi-day endeavour tying up my computing resources. I was burned once when Seagate submarined SMR drives into the Barracuda line, and I got a drive that was absolutely unfit for purpose. Never again.

That depends entirely on your usecase.

It matters to me. I got stuff to back up regularly, and I ain’t got all weekend.

The first copy of anything big will suck ass… and why else would you get a 36TB drive if not to copy a lot of data to it?

Instructions unclear. Brown marker stuck in my ass.

monkey’s paw curls They’re SMR

Yeah, if this kind of thing happens to someone often enough that they deem it worthy to make a low effort meme about it, they’re the kind of person who obliviously holds up traffic everywhere they go.