arstechnica[.]com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-disks-are-being-submarined-into-unexpected-channels/
I looked for, bought, & then exchanged a defective 5 TB USB drive, and yes, many [most?] of these drives are SMR as well as the NAS drives it talks about in the article. It's basically a way to cram more data on a regular [non-SSD] drive's platters, so the manufacturer can sell say a 5 TB drive that cost them the same as a 2.5 - 3 TB drive to produce. There are gotchas to this approach.
The defective drive I had only threw an error as I got almost 1 tb loaded on it, and it wasn't a conventional error, but a failure to update it's internal record keeping. Disk checks failed, HDD monitoring apps showed zero S.M.A.R.T. data, Win10 behaved screwy when it was attached, & wouldn't shut down or restart without hitting the power button etc. After reformatting, & with no data on it the drive appeared to be fine -- apparently it was the increased internal housekeeping that was failing. Per the article: "... SMR disks need to perform garbage-collection routines in the background and store incoming writes in a small CMR-encoded write-cache area of the disk, before moving them to the main SMR encoded storage."
Anyway, if you buy or are tempted to buy a non-SSD hard drive [which have their own host of potential issues to look out for], this is something you want to check. For large file storage, and particularly in write once, read many times situations, if you can save money buying an SMR drive it might work out OK. Otherwise look for an HDD that doesn't use the tech.
