Hacker News Reader

I assume that the drive firmware remaps all your writes to make them sequential anyway for increased write performance.

For drive-managed SMR drives, yes, but these seem to be host-managed ones. So the filesystem has to be aware of the zones.

> ... the filesystem has to be aware of the zones.

Does that mean the drives simply will not work with an unaware filesystem or that it will work but performance will be poor?

They will not work at all. You have to issue special commands to the drive to be able to overwrite zones.