Assuming this story is true, Linux is going to be a nightmare for that woman. It’s come a long way, but it’s still not as dead simple as it needs to be for non-technical elderly people.
I can appreciate the appeal of physical copies, but if it’s hindering your enjoyment then why not just listen to digital copies? The vinyl records are probably being scribed from a digital version, anyway.
The real downside to SMR drives is “random” writes; adjacent tracks need to be re-written, and then their adjacent tracks, and that keeps going until the tracks adjacent to a write happen to be empty. It doesn’t matter much for long sequential writes (because adjacent tracks will be overwritten anyway). I think the re-writing process also hurts read performance for the host, but reads alone don’t cause rewriting.
If you need to reshape/resilver your array (grow, shrink, or change geometry), it’ll probably take weeks or months with an SMR drive compared to days for a CMR drive.
The only time I’ve had drives from either company fail was when I knocked my drive cage off the desk while it was running; they’ve all been very reliable otherwise. Seagate drives are usually less expensive, though.
In active service I currently have 5 WD CMR drives, 1 WD SMR drive, 5 Seagate CMR drives, and 2 Seagate SMR drives. I also have 1 WD drive in storage. All WD drives are “Red” (the CMR ones now being called “Red Plus”), the CMR Seagate drives are “IronWolf”, and the SMR Seagate drives are “Barracuda”. My oldest WD drive is from 2018 and my oldest Seagate drive is from 2020.
I’ve thought WD was sleezy ever since they secretly switched from CMR drives to SMR drives, including in their NAS products (for which SMR drives are particularly unsuitable). So this doesn’t surprise me at all.
People need to stop buying WD drives and buy Seagate instead. They had their own SMR scandal, but at least they never put them in their NAS drives.