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Not Dead Yet: WD Releases New 6TB 2.5-Inch External Hard Drives - First Upgrade in Seven Years
(www.anandtech.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
From the article:
UPDATE 5/17, 6 PM: Western Digital has confirmed that the new 2.5-inch T GB HDDs uses 6 SMR platters
SMR = shingled magnetic recording https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording - "continuous writing of large amount of data is noticeably slower than with CMR drives"
They're external, you're not going to be using them for performance anyway.
Yes, I should've added - whether the write speed matters depends on your own use case.
For my SMR drive, it's taking roughly 2GB of backup files every few hours, in the background, and there's plenty of empty space on the drive. In my case, it doesn't matter at all.
However, if you're sat at your computer, frequently transferring large files while the drive is at least half full, and you have to wait for completion... Then it'll matter.