Everyone - and Mark, mostly - which are the most recommended HDD at this time, and how has the CRM-SRM issue evolved?

Would it be safe to say that a CMR Western Digital disk is in general a good choice in terms of 1. reliability and 2. performances, reliability being the most important thing?

Thank you!

Heh.. if at all possible, my own highest priority would be to avoid shingled (SMR) drives. The Seagate 4TB/8TB ones I had/used here not long ago have ALL turned out to be duds. 100% failures. I believe I still have a couple of RMA units (after exchanging the original duds) and those are treated as "untrusted".

Never again.

My personal philosophy/priorities when acquiring new drives:

-- Solid-state drives (SSD) if possible (currently up to 2TB).
-- Any brand of SSD is better than any same-size mechanical drive.
-- Anything except an SMR drive.
-- Avoid Seagate if possible.
-- The old (2-4 years ago) WD "Red" drives were excellent (pre-SMR).
-- Hitachi HGST drives are awesome, but Hitachi no longer exists.
-- The 14TB WD (Hitachi) drives I picked up last year are superb (WUH721414ALE6L4)

Thank you Mark. That is certainly useful.

I agree with Mark. My take on SMR is that they're "fine" for a system drive in an office computer, where nothing much is actually stored on the computer, other than the base OS, because everything's on a network drive. I wouldn't trust them for anything beyond that. But at that point, just get a small SSD.

WD eventually published a list of which drive models used SMR vs. CMR. Naturally, the 4 6TB drives I bought last year to upgrade our home NAS were submarined SMR. I RMA'd them immediately when I found out, and WD replaced them with 8TB CMR drives at no cost to me, other than my time in rebuilding my ZFS array disk-by-disk. So I ended up with a nice bonus out of the whole ordeal, at least.