Shucked drives are very often SMR so caveat emptor.

MrFoof · on April 5, 2021

SMR is very dependent on capacity and SKUs.

The vast majority of SMR hard disks are 6TB capacities and below, and I'm only aware on one 8TB Seagate SKU that is SMR. Though I'm aware HGST shipped a 20TB SMR drive late in 2020.

NAS Compares has a fairly good starting list of drives and whether or not they are CMR or SMR, though there may be more exhaustive lists out there: https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-d...

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In general, check the R/N of shucked white-label drives, and you should be able to quickly find a corresponding datasheet (hundreds of pages) from the manufacturer.

For example, some 16TB WD Elements I'm in the process of testing after shucking are R/N US7SAR160, which are 16TB HGST Ultrastar DC HC550. These are SATA 6Gbps 7200rpm helium-filled CMR drives with 512MB of cache.

andrewmunsell · on April 5, 2021

I did verify the ones I bought are not SMR, that was a requirement before I bought them in the first place.

pbhjpbhj · on April 5, 2021

SMR = shingled magnetic recording; comparison to conventional/perpendicular magnetic recording: https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutoria...