I've heard that SMR drives don't work well with RAID, but that's what I'm stuck with; even a JBOD/linear array would be better than nothing.
*Results in a r/w speed that is greater than or similar to the r/w speed of the slowest drive
My apprehension is based on reports from ServeTheHome:
When that NAS readiness was put to the test the drive performed spectacularly badly. The RAIDZ results were so poor that, in my mind, they overshadow the otherwise decent performance of the drive.
Confirmed by ArsTechnica:
At absolute best, SMR disks underperform significantly in comparison to CMR disks; at their worst, they can fall flat on their face so badly that they may be mistakenly detected as failed hardware.
And many anecdotal reports from other users in the DataHoarder (and similar) subreddit(s).
Note that while the discussion seems to be only on ZFS RAIDz performance, I strongly suspect that all similarly-functioning RAID implementations will be affected, too.