A quick search for SMR drives returned the 8 TB Barracuda Compute as the largest drive that is available at retail (or rather, indexed by geizahls.de or tweakers.net). And an amazing number of 3.5" 2 TB and 3 TB drives… 
Actually the last reference to large SMR drives I saw was:
Hard drive density advances face diminishing returns — 30TB+ drives gain just 6.6% capacity with SMR: Report | Tom's Hardware
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Yes, a 32TB from Seagate:
But, the 30TB is CMR so I am not sure how much of a win 2TB is. Now if they took the 30TB disk and got 50% more storage, for a total of 45TB, at a reasonable cost, that would be a winner.
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I’m old. I remember when this would have be 45MB and the size of a VW Bug. Okay, not that old but I remember pictures of the big drives.
I do remember installing my first hard drive, (at work), a half height 5 1/4" MFM at a whopping 5MBs! Then being so excited about the RLL controller which would give us 50% more storage!
A few years before that, I saw the BCC-500, a type of mini-computer. Of course it was the size of cabinets. It had both drum and disk storage, using the drum for swap. One of the 2 disk drives, (the size of home washer machines), seemed to have a vibration. When I mentioned it, they told me that was the one powered on. The other was powered off. Huh.
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but coming back to topic.
if i were to sum up my experience with smr
i was at least in the know (after patrick on youtube blew the lid on the whole smr drama by wd). so managed to dodge smr.
even when i didn’t know, i was fortunate/lucky not to have bought any wd red after wd tried to be sneaky sneaky and slip a turd into peoples nas on your dime 
but i’m sure many got bitten by this especially back then 
(where were the smr labels in the product description? oh right there were none 
until they got caught and had to cough up wd red plus 
)
surely wd faced hefty fines? not too sure about that but i’m sure their reputation took a dent
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Reputation? Nah.
Multiple members of the C suite that knew about these shenanigans should have been marched straight to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
Intentionally mislabeling mass-produced hard drives is simple theft on a massive scale and should be punished as fraud & wire fraud. I suspect the right DAs / AGs were paid off in advance to stave off this possibility.
Even if Western Digital did not get too bad of fines, (or any…), they still paid something through the returns. People bought WD Reds for NASes, found they were unsuitable and returned them to get free WD Red Pluses as “replacements”.
Though the users had pain, even a lot of pain at times, Western Digital did not get off free for those returns / exchanges.
This may may be the reason why it appears Western Digital has removed the plain WD Reds from their web site. The returns or exchanges may still be ongoing.
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That rebranding of Red NAS’ was the smallest fig leaf that the corporate lawyers could think of to stave off an investigation of the company. By subsequently [further] segmenting the [Red NAS product family with] market into Pro and Plus, they could claim that this was a segmentation vs. intentional fraud by substituting an inferior product.
The tell, however, is that Pro and [the] Plus [series] only emerged AFTER Red regular SMR substitution had been exposed. To me, that reeks of fraud.
DM-SMR hard drives are fundamentally incompatible with a large market segment in NAS-land, a fact that the researchers at HGST acknowledged publicly on YouTube video years before WD started to slip SMR drives into the Red line. TrueNAS and all other ZFS-based systems are unlikely, if ever, to be truly compatible with DM-SMR - ie no freakouts due to drives going offline as each CMR cache in a VDEV is flushed to SMR, etc.
HA- and HM-SMR would require a lot of low level work / verification to make them 100% compatible with ZFS. It’s unlikely to happen given how SMR presently seems to offer very little benefit at the highest reaches of hard drive capacity. SMR is likely going to be a remembered as a temporary means of increasing platter areal density and may henceforth only find widespread use in 2.5” drives.
I also reject that the returns made a difference. It should have cost much of the c-suite their jobs and several of them should have gone to jail. Shareholders were hurt, users were hurt, the reputation of the company took a massive hit, yet the people that likely attempted to pad their personal bottom line by reaching an arbitrary corporate goal are still there.
[Edited to include correction that the Pro series existed before pollution of the Red NAS series with SMR drives. See here for a chronological retelling of the various sub-brands at reddit. My apologies for the mis-statement.]
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Emphasis on Pro mine.
The WD Red Pro drives were out many years before the WD Red SMR problems. I personally bought 2 WD Red Pro 4TB to be part of my old FreeNAS Mini, so they would have a different failure rate / cycle than the other 2 drives, WD Red regulars, (before SMR).
I am not attempting to give Western Digital a pass on the issue. Just stating a fact, WD Red Pros existed years before WD Red SMRs were introduced.
For those interested, my old FreeNAS Mini was designed with diverse drives in an attempt to spread any failure out. Turns out I never needed that, but I had the money and it was easy. Today I use both different vendors, Seagate & Toshiba, for the hard drives.
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Apologies. I thought both Pro and Plus arrived only after the debacle. I have made corrections above to reflect that. Thank you for correcting me.
According to a user at Reddit /datahoarder, the Plus Red NAS series was rushed out as the scope of the Red regular NAS problem became apparent. The posting also suggests that the SMR problem is limited to a few capacities within the Red line. I would not count on that.
Always check any drive you’re considering buying by SKU to verify it’s not a SMR. Generic drive names / families mean nothing, you want to dive down to the specifics. After all, your data very likely depends on it, the time needed to make the check is minimal, and the cost difference between SMR and CMR drives is usually also minimal.
In an honest market, SMR ‘so-called NAS’ drives would have been sold at a discount to reflect their inferior performance in a NAS setting. Ethical OEMs would have prominently mentioned the use of SMR inside their drives to allow potential users to make informed decisions. Enough unethical behavior leads to subsequent regulations that industries like to moan about, see Frank-Dobbs, among many other examples.
Time to get off the soapbox. Apologies for rant but this example, along with similar later issues at WD re: their SSDs really put me off the brand. They simply cannot help themselves, they keep trying to screw over customers by substituting inferior technology, components, whatever and hope no one notices. Argh.
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I’ve always been a fan of the idea that using a different color to denote SMR drives would have been the best solution.
WD Brown, perhaps.
For no particular reason, of course.
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I don’t know, perhaps Nuclear Yellow would be better.
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In an honest market, they would’ve been called “Red Minus”
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It seems like SMR could be useful for certain applications, for instance where you want to write only once or very rarely, and then read frequently, such as for serving media files, or maybe for long-term archival. However it seems you’d need either proper filesystem support, or at least keep it simple with something like ext4. It appears SMR does get a lot of use in the removable USB-connected 2.5" HDDs, so maybe it’s not a completely worthless technology.
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Well, if you want it for media files, consider SMR HDDs like you would CD / DVD / Blue-ray burning. Create an image copy of the SMR disk on flash SSD or CMR HDD, then “burn” it once. No need to backup and copy next tracks, as they are empty.
Of course whatever file system you would have to install, should be as close to read only as possible. So no access time updates, or backup bit setting would be stored on the SMR.
Hey, SMR HDDs could even be part of a tiered storage unit. Put the volatile info, like directory entries and other metadata in a non-SMR tier. Then reserve the SMR tier for media or archival storage only. Just the, (possibly huge amount of), data on the SMR HDDs.
Even treat SMR HDDs as tape, use once, then move the data to another. Whence a SMR is “empty” again, it becomes available for write only process.
Gee, did I just solve the best use case for SMR HDDs?
That will be 10% for any use of my idea 
Yes, these are the use-cases I was basically thinking of. The problem I see is that, in the real world, SMR just doesn’t seem to offer enough of an improvement in space/cost over CMR to make it worthwhile, except I guess for those removable 2.5" drives where they really are just used for backups and occasional use.
I’ve recurrently learned that Seagate has Hybrid-SMR AKA HSMR X18z (and X20z disks that are supposedly switchable between SMR and CMR, at a slight capacity hit, 18TB vs 20TB). you can find a select few example being sold on ebay if you are curious. (they clearly aren’t meant for normal consumers)
what very little is out there says they will and won’t work… (just random people on reddit saying that they got these through amazon resellers, they work at CMR capacity but no warranty, etc. but the ebay pages say they won’t at all…) though would almost certainly require special vendor specific software to do the “switch”.
but really, the reason I bring this up is the capacity difference, 10% is not all that much to gain when you consider you are giving up potentially a massive amount of write performance.
Ah, but only 10% more space indicates that they would be faster than a SMR supplying 50% more space.
I more or less think 50% is the mark point. 10% is way too little to bother with SMR. Especially if we have 30TB CMR drives now, which should give us 45TB SMR drives. Yes, slow to write, but for archival or static media serving, perfectly fine.
As explained in the article I linked to above, current CMR already packs the tracks tighter so SMR has lesser benefits. At some point the gain will be too small to justify managing special drivers for HM-SMR.
On the consumer side, only 2.5" SMR drives are left. These have been stuck at 5 TB for quite some time. Meanwhile:
Consumers SSDs will just close the gap with external 2.5" HDDs in the near future and obliterate this threatened species (no need to write it down in CITES lists, it just doesn’t deserve any protection).
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The problem with SSDs is they’re not suitable for long term storage: they need to be powered up occasionally so the data doesn’t disappear. I’m not sure how long they can persist in actual practice, but theoretically a HDD could be stored in an underground vault for centuries safely, but SSDs may lose their data after months or a few years.
For online storage, and shorter-term.backups (that you expect to access regularly as part of a rotating backup solution perhaps) however, it does seem like SSDs are going to eclipse HDDs within a decade in cost-effectiveness.