It absolutely will work. Before I knew the difference between SMR & CMR, and when WD obscured this on their reds, I bought SMR to use in a raid2 setup. I first noticed something was wrong when sequential write performance would begin to tank sharply on the drives and it wasn't due to the ZiL. Replacement of a failed drive was slow, very slow but I would work. After 5 years in service I replaced them with CMR drives one at a time. The replacement speed from the first to the last increase about 3x.
So don't agree with the doom sayers about SMR but for the few $ more over the course of 5 years, I'll go with the speed.