> (careful about CMR vs SMR)

Given the context of long term storage... why?

After I was bamboozled with a SMR drive, always great to just make the callout to those who might be unaware. What a piece of garbage to let vendors upsell higher numbers.

(Yes, I know some applications can be agnostic to SMR, but it should never be used in a general purpose drive).

Untested hypothesis, but I would expect the wider spacing between tracks in CMR makes it more resilient against random bit flips. I'm not aware of any experiments to prove this and it may be worth doing. If the HD manufacture can convince us that SMR is just as reliable for archival storage it would help them sell those drives since right now lots of people are avoiding SMR due to poor performance and the infamy of the bait-and-switch that happened a few years back.