Sorry to address this so late.

Does the manual count?

Performance is/was not my concern. The goal was to increase capacity and to get some aging 512GB disks out of the system.

SSD sounds nice but the motherboard in question was a quick-n-dirty replacement for one that failed. The dead board had six SATA ports and I was running three RAID1 devices in it. One SATA port on the replacement board doubled as the only SSD port. The system would have been a SATA port shy had I decided that an SSD was needed.

Cheers...

Both Seagate and WD were/are doing that. In fact, my first encounter with SMR was with a 2TB Seagate drive. They were foisted on the public without disclosure and performed really bad in certain environments. I bought mine at MicroCenter and returned it the next day when it didn't finish a clone of my existing drive overnight. That's when I learned about SMR. I don't know about other retailers, but MicroCenter now designates whether the drive is CMR or SMR in their product descriptions.

As far as WD drives go, I've always went with the WD Black line. I believe they are all CMR and they have a 5 year warranty compared to 3 years for most others. I take that as an indication of WD's confidence in their product.