> What hardware, though?

Good question. There seems to be no way to tell whether or not we're gonna get junk when we buy hard drives. Manufacturers got caught putting SMR into NAS drives. Even if you deeply research things before buying, everything could change tomorrow.

Why is this so hard? Why can't we have a CMR drive that just works? That we can expect to last for 10 years? That properly reports I/O errors to the OS?