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.)

Update: I have given the PC gamer demo another look after finding it on a very old hard drive. While it does not match my memory precisely, or even super closely, some key details do match, including one specific ore placement and the existence of two caves close to spawn. I suspect this must be the correct seed and I have been misremembering the details.

I used to use them, but found that since I’m only hosting for myself, I just don’t benefit much (if at all) from their services. The only thing that was actually doing any amount of work was Tunnel (similar to you, I can’t forward ports).

Their service decrypts/snoops on your traffic by nature, and while my traffic is mostly just updating todo lists, taking notes, and backing up photos, I also sync my keepass database and in general just don’t want my data snooped on.

I’ve since rolled my own Tunnel equivalent with frp on a VPS and have completely dropped CF.

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.

It was PC. I’ve tried the PC gamer demo and the “North Carolina” seed for all probable game versions (1.3 to 1.6), and the base world generation just doesn’t match. There is a hill nearby which could be close, but the biomes are all wrong.

There is a chance, albeit not very high, that it was a cracked version of the game using a seed I simply forgot with time, but it would be quite difficult to brute force that since I would then need to figure out both the version and seed. Given I am fairly certain I generated the same world a few times, it’s possible I might be able to guess it.

I grew up playing a very specific Minecraft trial world. You spawn on a beach with a single tree. Immediately inland was a large plains biome, but about 100 blocks to the side was an oak forest. In there (still visible from spawn), was a single large hill with a small cave in it which poked though it and made for a good base.

I am rather confident it was a Minecraft trial edition world. I believe I reset that map several times over before discovering how to make the trial last forever. However the trial seed on the wiki does not match for any game version. (It does match a different world I remember playing at least.)

I’ve probably spent about 10 hours over the last couple years periodically going on the hunt for it, and at this point I’ll give out a small bounty for information.