Need help to find 2.5" CMR drive 2TB or more

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Hi all, my name is Frank and I am new here. What I am looking for is a 2.5 inch drive of 2TB or larger that uses CMR not SMR!

What have I done, I searched all WD 2.5 inch drives I could find and it looks like all of them that are 1TB of more use SMR. I can not seem to find any that clearly state that CMR is used.

Reason why I am looking for a CMR drive. I will be making a regular backup / clone of my laptop as a disaster recovery. The drive should be bootable and I want the backup to be fast and reliable. When booting I will be restoring the drive to a new system drive. Mostly sequential read’s.

The software I will be using for the backup / clone procedure is called Carbon Copy Cloner also known as CCC. There is very clear advice what ‘not’ to use. Choosing a backup drive | Carbon Copy Cloner | Bombich Software

At the moment I only seem to see SMR disks everywhere. Any tips are welcome.

I am actually looking for an external drive but can not find any that is clearly CMR. Therefor I am now looking into selecting an internal drive that I will put into an external enclosure that will interface between USB 3 and SATA.

Also the option of an 3.5 inch CMR drive is still open. The same applies, either an internal SATA disk that I will put in an USB enclosure or an external USB 3 disk.

Edit:
I found the WD Laptop Everyday, 2TB
EAN: 0718037861555
SKU: WDBMYH0020BNC-WRSN
I have the feeling this one is SMR and not CMR. Is that correct?

2

I have not seen a laptop disk at 2TB that was not drive managed shingled. If this is an issue a SATA SSD is available in the same form factor and they are available up to 8TB.

3

Thank you for your reply. Conclusion at the moment is that basically all 2.5 inch drives with decent storage space use SMR. I have also looked at SSD’s but they are 4 to 5 times the cost of conventional drives. It looks like I will have to go for 3.5 inch bricks and pay attention to the CMR / SMR issue.

4

Desktop disks are sold in a USB box for backups. Those range up to 16TB the last time I looked at the range.

Desktop disks are far less expensive to a SSD are good for backup targets.

I use an old desktop as NAS as it has 4 hard disk bays and integrated graphics uses little power.

5

I also have a Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution for data backup. It uses two WD RED disks in a mirrored configuration.

The Direct Attached Storage (DAS) is the second backup, a disaster recovery plan for the whole system of the laptop, not only the data. The concept is that this disk is bootable and would give me literally zero downtime when the laptop would run into an issue of any kind.

I really like SSD storage as a system volume in laptop or workstation. Very good performance. But SSD’s come at a price.

I still think rotating rust, the conventional hard drive, is still the most reliable and economical way to store vast amounts of data like an archive or backup. This might change in the future, but at this moment HDD is the way to go.