I am debating between those Western Digital portable drives that go up to 5tb that function with USB only (WD my passport) and the bigger ones (eg my book) that are bigger and need power outlet besides the USB connection.
Is there any difference in quality or durability to store media?
I give you a paintbrush. I want you paint a rectangle. With CMR, the brush can paint stripes as wide as the itself. Simple, fast, reliable, but you can only fit so many stripes in that rectangle.
Enter SMR. With SMR, you can paint smaller stripes and fit more of them in the rectangle with the same sized bush by painting over your old stripes. You cover part of it up with the next pass but enough of the old stripe is left exposed you can still see what’s there.
But there’s a problem. What if something changes? Now you go back and paint again and it overwrites multiple stripes, so you have to cover that up again on the next line, which means you have to just keep going down the line, trying to fix the damage from the changed line above it. The drives firmware can handle that by itself just fine but now that simple change means the drive has a lot more work to do.
If you need to write once, change never, read many, SMR is fine. For literally anything else, it’s worthless.