lexluthermiester The science behind the ability to do that must be interesting.

I don't really think this is as big of a deal as what WD did. With Seagate, these drives aren't supposed to be used in RAID arrays, so the SMR really doesn't matter. Yeah, you can argue that if you use one of these drives as a system drive, it can really slow the system down. But in this day an age, you shouldn't be using any HDD as a system drive, they all really slow the system down. Worst case, buy an cheap 120GB SSD to run Windows on.Yes, I know a lot of people install games and programs to HDDs and run those off of the HDD. And really, SMR drives work just fine for that. They all have a small part of the drive that is used as a traditional CMR drive to absorb small writes(kind of like a pseudo-SLC cache in an SSD). And even when that cache is full, the write speed is still fast enough to keep up with an internet connection if you are downloading a large game off Steam or something like that. And read speeds on these drives are normal just like any other HDD, it's only the writes that are slow. I've been using one as my programs/games drive in my AMD rig for years, and there was really only one time when I noticed slowness and that was when I was installing Adobe Suite from an external SSD. It took about double the time it normally takes to install to a hard drive.On the other hand WD use SMR drives and labelled them for RAID/NAS use. This is a big no-no without actually telling the customer the drives are SMR. Using SMR drives in a RAID is fineall the drives are SMR. But micing SMR and CMR drives can lead to problems. You need either all CMR or all SMR drives. Without proper labeling by WD, this becomes a nightmare.Not really, it should be pretty easy to do actually. With SMR, the write head is bigger than the tracks, lets assume it's 3 tracks wide. So when you write something to the drive, you have to write multiple tracks at once. This slows down write dramatically, because if you only need to write data to 1 of the tracks, you first have to read the data from the other 2 tracks, write the data from the other 2 tracks somewhere else temporarily(you can't store it in volatile RAM because it would risk data loss in a power failure), then write the data for all 3 tracks. So, say the write head is 3 tracks wide and it is a 6TB drive. The first 2TB is written by just writing one of the 3 tracks, the other 2 overlapping tracks aren't written. Once 2TB of the drive is use, the single tracks are full, it starts using SMR to write to the other overlapping tracks.