Given that 40GB is like $6 of ssd, it wouldn't be hard to provide an actual useful SSD buffer.
I got a Lenovo laptop for the parents a long time ago that had a hybrid hard drive; I think maybe 8 or 16GB builtin SSD. Man that thing was just absolute trash, so slow; ghastly long boot times or time to launch a browser.
Ideally a SMR drive has a SMR capable file-system, where it can write data into linear logs & them try to batch rewrite the metadata. Even the pathologically terrible random writes can be somewhat coped with via accommodating fs.
The SSDs that go that fast also have multiple dies per channel. And write speed is the relevant metric here, but SLC caching isn't useful unless you have flash capacity to spare.
I got a Lenovo laptop for the parents a long time ago that had a hybrid hard drive; I think maybe 8 or 16GB builtin SSD. Man that thing was just absolute trash, so slow; ghastly long boot times or time to launch a browser.
Ideally a SMR drive has a SMR capable file-system, where it can write data into linear logs & them try to batch rewrite the metadata. Even the pathologically terrible random writes can be somewhat coped with via accommodating fs.