Ehhhh, you aren't far off. Star Trek jargon was literally made up by the actors and writers, at least according to some of the original cast, with them mimicking the technical jargon that their friends in technical careers, especially electrical engineers, were using at the time.

I am tech savvy and I've never heard of SMR or CMR. After reading up on it, I don't think it really matters. SMR is newer technology, and is maybe more reliable in the short term, but the drives fail faster because of the extra wear and tear, and the drives are slower than CMR.

https://history-computer.com/smr-vs-cmr-hard-drives/

Edit: I missed that SMR is supposed to be worse, despite being newer. So I guess WD is putting slower and sooner failing drives out to save a buck.

I've been using ironwolf/exos drives for years without any issues. The 3TB fiasco runs deep and people need to just let it go.

Each manufacturer has their bad batches tbh. I've got 12 WD 3TB's that have been running without a single failure for years, but of the six 4TB WD's that I bought later five have died already. I've been replacing those with 8TB ironwolfs, which have so far been behaving well.

The only time I've had drives from either company fail was when I knocked my drive cage off the desk while it was running; they've all been very reliable otherwise. Seagate drives are usually less expensive, though.

In active service I currently have 5 WD CMR drives, 1 WD SMR drive, 5 Seagate CMR drives, and 2 Seagate SMR drives. I also have 1 WD drive in storage. All WD drives are "Red" (the CMR ones now being called "Red Plus"), the CMR Seagate drives are "IronWolf", and the SMR Seagate drives are "Barracuda". My oldest WD drive is from 2018 and my oldest Seagate drive is from 2020.

Yeah, my experience with Seagate has sucked.

A few years back i got a failed drive replaced under warranty... died like 6 months shy of its 3 year warranty date. They said they'd replace it and sent me a refurbished drive. It died shortly after it was plugged in, before I'd even started copying files to it. I could literally hear something rolling around in the drive. They replaced it again and the new drive failed similarly... plugged in for a while and then windows started reporting it was not accessible. 3rd drive worked, and still works, but I sure as shit don't trust it and haven't bought Seagate since.

How long do they last? I haven't had any problems so far.

The real downside to SMR drives is "random" writes; adjacent tracks need to be re-written, and then their adjacent tracks, and that keeps going until the tracks adjacent to a write happen to be empty. It doesn't matter much for long sequential writes (because adjacent tracks will be overwritten anyway). I think the re-writing process also hurts read performance for the host, but reads alone don't cause rewriting.

If you need to reshape/resilver your array (grow, shrink, or change geometry), it'll probably take weeks or months with an SMR drive compared to days for a CMR drive.

Yeah, SMR is fine for read. And for most homelabs, I'd guess it would be fine. SMR would be a bastard in a high read/write scenario like in an enterprise. But I think all the Red Plus and Red Pros are all CMR now. Only the base Reds have SMR from the sample I took.

I got burned by WD's secret SMR drives in my home NAS and they sucked! They were marketed as NAS drives, but the performance was abominable, the failed sector count grew steadily from day 1 and it felt like they failed 1 early. Once the whole sordid fiasco came to light I switched to Seagate CMR drives and everything has been mostly OK since then.