SMR drives aren't lower quality or cheaper, though, and are used in production storage arrays. A NAS is also "not a backup". The panic was mostly driven by peo

SMR drives aren't lower quality or cheaper, though, and are used in production storage arrays. A NAS is also "not a backup". The panic was mostly driven by people removing the hard drives from WD EasyStores to take advantage of the significantly lower cost per TB for repurposed Red and White label HDDs and a loophole regarding the warranty. This happened at the height of the Chia boom when decom disk shelves went from being e-waste to costing MSRP and the supply of large format storage dried up. Many people learned that year that a hard drive is not just a hard drive. WD did change the <6TB WD Red NAS drives to SMR, but SMR drives aren't less reliable or unsuitable for use in prosumer NAS products. CMR and SMR shouldn't be mixed, but they weren't shipping mixed batches.