Which is why the manufacturer shouldn't have branded them as NAS drives!

You're preaching to the choir. SMR drives are absolutely not NAS-ready, and it's insulting for WD to pretend otherwise.

> SMR drives are absolutely not NAS-ready

DM-SMR at the very least. If the RAID controller (hardware or software) is SMR-capable, then host-managed or host-aware can work.

For example, ZFS with the recent support for separate metadata devices[1] seems to be close to what you'd need for it to become SMR-capable.

[1]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/5182

Fair distinction.