>> I have been careful not to buy SMR drives, but AIUI they are cost
>> effective for large sequential write workloads -- e.g. music/ photo/
>> video/ ISO files, backup/ archive tarballs, images/ clones, etc..
AFAIK SMR drives are just as good as PMR drives when it comes to
reading, so it should work fine for a read-only OS partition.
I wouldn't recommend it for a swap partition, OTOH :-)
Stefan