SMR Hard Drives have very different rules about how you should access them vs conventional hard drives or SSDs. I wonder how much optimizing for SMR drives (Big sequential writes) would also optimize for other drive types.
Not that different. DM-SMR needs you to write about 256-512M sequentially before FUA or they'll journal the write which positively annihilates throughput once the journal is full. Erase blocks in a modern SSD are probably still somewhat smaller than that, but not by much (32-64M?). With DM-SMR it's also important to avoid interleaving writes. Writing parallel streams of sequential chunks tanks performance since it starts journaling. At least that's what it looked like when I was developing some code that had to deal with them some years ago.
Many TLC+ SSDs started using SLC/MLC areas for accelerating writes and the overall performance of those looks a lot like DM-SMR when journaling, you can write some percentage of the disk size with good/advertised performance, and then it drops off (less dramatically so on SSDs).
I feel fooled after clicking on the link and seeing that this PDF is downloading (or just literally writing to my SSD) until I realized that this is the point
Many TLC+ SSDs started using SLC/MLC areas for accelerating writes and the overall performance of those looks a lot like DM-SMR when journaling, you can write some percentage of the disk size with good/advertised performance, and then it drops off (less dramatically so on SSDs).