Which 4TB (CMR) hard drive?

I wonder if you have any recommendations for a 4TB ‘budget’ hard drive that doesn’t feature SMR recording technology?

From what I have been able to work out, WD Blue models https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-blue-hdd with model numbers that end in RZ seem to offer CMR recording technology. From what I understand, these ‘Blue’ WD drives are rebranded ‘green’ drives of yesteryear and they have a 5400rpm ‘speed class’. I’m not even sure how much spindle speeds matter today on high-density platters, especially when WD decide to muddy the waters with speed ‘classes’.

It seemed easier in the past. I’d just pick the 7200rpm drive of my choosing. Now we seem to have more drive segmentation and fairy language.

I have also looked at Seagate IronWolf drives (and others) because I am told they feature CMR technology https://www.seagate.com/au/en/internal-hard-drives/cmr-smr-list/ I am unsure if Ironwolf NAS drives are OK even though the 4TB drive I want will only be used in a typical desktop. The marketing for these NAS drives seems to underscore reliability and vibration resistance which kind of appeals to me, even though all the NAS talk is irrelevant to me. Would this be better than the WD ‘Blue’ WD40EZRZ ? These IronWolf spin at 5900RPM, apparently. Again, no idea if that has any relevance today. But kind of interesting how we have no 7200rpm at this price point.

I also briefly looked at the WD Black WD4005FZBX : I am not prepared to pay this much for a 4TB drive, though 7200rpm spindle speeds and larger caches sound great. So I guess that price bracket is out of the question.

Any advice? The drive will mostly be used for running games and apps on a Ryzen 2600X with 32GB ram. The OS is on a separate drive.

The 4TB WD Black was on sale at Amazon US for $152. Seemed a reasonable price to me. You didn’t say what price range you were looking for.

While Google searching I saw a bunch of older enterprise 4 TB drives on sale from various sources for about $80 each, various brands. I am not sure about buying those, they had less cache RAM and no free shipping. And of course, watch out for SAS.

you want reliable storage for your games, at a budget, in the 4gb range, with CMR or no SMR

well once you find out what drive you need here is a good palace to find a good deal at least on amazon.
If you don’t want used make sure to uncheck that

https://diskprices.com/

5400 va 7200rpm speed differences is there but honestly get an ssd if speed and price are an issue. buying fast hard disks is IMHO a waste. Just uninstall and reinstall games as you use them if its JUST for games.

100$ 4tb Ironwolf 5400 reliable but slow

$194 NVME m.2 2tb faster than a disk but not huge

$140 6tb cmr Hard drive more like what you are looking for maybe but idk about toshiba, no experience

$160 1tb ssd good ssd but you can probably find better

Australian dolllars first. (USD conversion)

within budget:
$146 (~USD$104) WD Blue WD40EZRZ
$165 (~USD$117) WD Red NAS WD40EFRX
$159 (~USD$113) Seagate Ironwolf NAS ST4000VN008

out of budget:
$268 (~USD$190) Seagate Barracuda Pro ST4000DM006
$253 (~USD$180) WD Black WD4005FZBX

The out-of-budget (7200rpm) drives from Seagate and WD are about $100 more (~$70 USD) over their cheaper offerings. I am listing them to illustrate that I am unwilling to spend that much. So I wonder if those NAS drives will be better, or should I just stick to ‘vanilla’ general-purpose ‘not-NAS’ drives (WD Blue, etc).

I am also open to any other drive suggestions that I might want to look into. Appreciate the advice.

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