at least you didn't plug in your power cable upside down to fry the pcb of the hdd like i did.

@NZgamer This *is* my backup solution, but it is nowhere near as robust as i'm comfortable with. Just a single drive.

Dream would be 4 8TB drives, 2 of which are parity, but I am holding off since WD seems to be slipping out some SMR drives out of late and I want to make SURE I dont get stuck with those.

@SenKa It's only SMR on the "low end" 1 to 4 TB drives but not on 8 to 16TB ones:

https://hexus.net/tech/news/storage/141655-seagate-wd-quietly-introduce-smr-drives-says-report/

@Pascal... I thought I had read that WD had slipped some SMR 8TB drives in to their Red family. I was wrong.

Quote

 

Seagate reached out to TechSpot and clarified that it does not market SMR-based hard drives as NAS drives. "Seagate confirms that we do not utilize Shingled Magnetic Recording technology (SMR) in any IronWolf or IronWolf Pro drives." The company's Barracuda 8TB (ST8000DM004) and 5TB Desktop (ST500DM000) were previously called out for using SMR without specifying the tech, however, the drives are not aimed at NAS consumers and should be treated as such.

Similarly, Toshiba's P300 4TB (HDWD240UZSVA) and 6TB (HDWD260UZSVA) desktop drives aren't directly aimed at the NAS market but they also use SMR without specifying it. In its documentation for the P300, the company says that the drive "delivers high performance for professionals," so buyers should know what they're getting before making a purchase.

This leaves Western Digital, which notes that its 2TB-6TB Red drives, aimed at NAS consumers, have device-managed SMR (DMSMR), while remaining models in the 8TB-14TB capacities use CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording).