Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and so forth buy most of the spinning rust, and have for years. Each of them have their own extremely proprietary storage layer that knows how to manage Shingled Magnetic Recording.

So when SMR got released into the open market, it was exclusively drive managed, and mainly on the low-end, as a cost reduction strategy. With all the performance downsides you'd expect.

It is a real shame that host managed SMR isn't available outside the mega-scale corps. It would be nice to have access to an intelligent storage stack mixing flash and SMR drives without having to go work for one of the big N companies.