14TB Hard Drives Now Available
SMR drives can be thought of as tape libraries.  You have a bunch of large, independent tapes that can all be written sequentially.  But you can't do random writes to the tape.  (SMR drives also have a lower density, non-SMR "scratch region" that can be used for metadata, or to build up to a larger I/O piecemeal.  My metaphor is breaking down here.)<p>They're not generally useful for the kinds of applications harddrives are classically used for (classic filesystems).  They're mostly useful for applications that already use tape, with the benefit of much quicker random reads.<p>Log filesystems may be able to take advantage of them.  There will necessarily be I/O overhead to garbage collect deleted files out of SMR regions.  (Because you have to rewrite the entire SMR region to compact.)<p>Is anyone using or planning to use SMR drives in production?  If you're able to share, I'd be curious to learn about your use case and how you plan to make efficient use of the disk.