Sequential write management in accordance with the present description permits impermissible write retries to be processed by a hard drive such as a Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) hard dive. In one embodiment, logic returns a successful write indication in response to a received retry write request operation without writing data to the SMR hard drive if the data of the received retry write operation has already been successfully written to the same location requested by the received retry write request operation. Conversely, a failure notice is returned if the data of the received retry write request operation has not been previously successfully written to the same location requested by the received retry write request operation. Other features and aspects may be realized, depending upon the particular application.