HDD prices have surged significantly in recent days, and HM-SMR can provide storage with a lower budget. Although it is well-known that SMR has poor write performance, for media files (such as movies, TV series, and music) that are written once, read multiple times, and rarely modified, HM-SMR is suitable. Currently, the built-in BTRFS in Unraid seems to already support zoned devices, but the kernel options have not enabled the corresponding flags. So, is it possible to support HM-SMR on a BTRFS pool, providing a new option for media file storage where redundancy is less concerned?

(And I know of course that HM-SMR is not ready for Unraid array mode as that has random writes.)

There are also some discussions here:

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/180919-host-managed-smr-wd-dc-hc650-sata-6gbs-20tb-drives-and-unraid/

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/136443-host-managed-smr/

I was looking into this, hm-smr drives don't support using a normal partition; you must create the filesystem using the whole disk (/dev/sdX), Unraid currently requires a partition to work, so while this may be supported in the future, I would not expect it in the near future; it would require big code changes by LT.