Could you elaborate on that a bit further, Slim? I would not want to get the wrong drives because of my interconnects. What criteria would you be looking at. Color?
After some more back and forth in my head on the subject, I have come to the conclusion that the PMR vs SMR question is indeed not the key one.
The essential requirement after all your inputs seem to be:
- Drive connected with low latency (internal or USB to Core)
- Plug and play without opening the Core’s case
- should accommodate large library of several TB
- Good backup
That rules out a 2TB internal drive because of no plug and play and the size limit, regardless of whether it is SMR or PMR.
This leaves me with @RBM 's solution, watered down a bit.
- External USB drive. In my case 3.5" as these have better read performance than 2.5" and I have no need to keep it that small
- Backup to a NAS via rsync
Thanks a lot for all the inputs. They did add clarity as I asked myself, whether the PMR / SMR tradeoff was the relevant one here. It certainly is in other cases such as RAID systems or desktop work disks, but probably not with Roon.