@Rotty
there are minimal advantages aside from slightly less price on SMR drives.
i would recommend you go with a conventional HDD CMR and because it’s very latency demanding getting 7200 rpm should be preferred, some report that their SMR drives don’t feel much different from a CMR, while others (often owners of the older models) are quite angry for being mislead when buying them.
that point aside, even if we say they are at 80% write speed of what CMR drives are… then the price difference is rarely more than also 10-20%… so imo it’s not worth risking buying SMR drives at the moment, ofc that also very much depends on the workloads… but storagenodes are presently very demanding on the drive write ability.
if you where buying a hdd for storing personal data, then SMR would be fine great even because their price point is among the lowest possible on the price pr TB
Another thing that might be worthy of consideration is how much extra you need to spend to get a drive that is a notch above the usual consumer grade, which tho runs fine for 24/7 operations, but isn’t really designed with that in mind… and supposedly has a more limited lifespan.
and try to avoid seagate, their drives tend to be cheap… for good reason
but again some of their models in latter years seem to have been performing quite good, so who knows recommendation like that often shift faster than the wind…
so long story short…
avoid SMR avoid 5400 rpm and avoid seagate if possible… that would be on the top of my list when looking for new drives.
else i look for stuff like NCQ, which means the disk reads or writes in a smarter / faster way.
also keep in mind that there are consideration of 512, 512e and 4kn drives, but if you are only buying one it doesn’t matter much, however the 4k drive format will reduce overhead from 10% to 3% when formatting the drive… meaning the actual space you get isn’t 90% but 97%
or should be… haven’t really had much luck with getting that to work myself…
also depending on if you intend to utilize the drive in a raid, it is by far the best all the drives are the same model if possible and that they all run the same sector size… ie 512, 512e or 4kn
else you can run into all sort of issues… IO Amplification or Data amplification
it’s a damn science good luck lol