2.) I’ve always wondered, but didn’t want to get flamed for asking: What if you have pet chickens? I don’t eat them, they live a great chicken life, but I end up with a ton of eggs that I give to people I know. Obviously those eggs are eaten. Does this count as some kind of horrible animal cruelty?

Eh, it depends on how you look at it. Chickens are just domesticated Red Junglefowl, and we’ve bred them over the last few thousand years to be bigger, (probably tastier), and lay a lot more eggs.

IMO, egg layers and other common breeds are probably perfectly happy and comfortable birds without any ‘real’ cruelty. The way we’ve bred them certainly has made them more susceptible to certain health problems and shortened their max lifespan some (compared to their wild ancestors), but my experience with my birds has been that as long as they’re healthy, they seem to be perfectly happy with life.

I think of it the same as how we’ve bred Border Collies into existence. They’re very different from their pre-domestication ancestors, but they’re also not so severely altered that they have inherent health issues or other severe issues.

Broilers (meat chickens), however are definitely on the crueler side. Those poor things are only meant to convert feed to meat, and the whole living part is probably considered undesirable. Most only need to live somewhere between a month and a year before slaughter, and I imagine if you let them go any longer they’ll drop dead from health issues.

For some reason, there’s a weird 8TB 5640 RPM Blue that’s CMR. I have one.

Dunno about the rest for sure but I think they’re all SMR (except maybe 1TB).

In my experience, all that truly matters is that the drive is on the right recording technology (CMR, SMR, and maybe someday HAMR will be in the hands of us consumer plebs).

There are two reasons to care:

1. SMR has horrible write speeds. Data can read off the drive at the same speed as a CMR drive, but writes will be unbelievably slow.
2. More importantly, for some reason or another (I assume the write speed), SMR drives might get rejected by ZFS. There was some pretty loud talk about it several years ago, but I haven’t heard much since and do not know if this is still true (I assume it is).

If your use case involves only ever writing a small amount of data, point 1 doesn’t matter very much. If you’re using software which doesn’t care about CMR/SMR, point 2 doesn’t matter very much.

If either point 1 or 2 matter to you, then you should go with CMR drives. If neither matter, you may go with SMR drives if you so chose.

PS: Both WD Blues and Seagate Barracudas are (often) CMR. Seagate consult this page: https://www.seagate.com/products/cmr-smr-list/. WD lists SMR/CMR on their website when you look up the part number.

In my home NAS, I use ZFS and have ran all sorts of drives through it. It’s ran old consumer drives I’ve pulled out of scrap hardware, it’s ran NAS-grade drives, and it’s ran enterprise-grade drives… And since they’re all CMR, I can’t say there was much if any difference at all.

The only difference between the tiers that I find interesting/useful is the number of metrics you can pull off the drive. The fancier ones spit more metrics which could help you detect signs of failure earlier, but that requires knowing what to look for.

So at the end of the day, as long as the drive’s recording technology works with your software, you’re fine.

RE: External drives (seen in a comment)

External drives can be a great way to get disks for cheap, however they are loot boxes. What drive you get inside of them depends on the capacity, the manufacturer, and pure luck. You can generally look up the model number and see what people have said is inside, then hope you get whatever they got. (Generally, manufacturers don’t often change what they put in there, but they do change over time.)

You’re good in that there are no immediate problems with that setup. I run a largely similar setup, have run it for years, and have never had issues.

You can always add more security layers if desired, but from my personal experience and with my risk tolerance, I haven’t personally found it necessary.