[vladvasiliu]

The main issue is that larger capacity drives (> 2TB) seem to be SMR in the 2.5" range. I've looked and haven't found a PMR one (except maybe for "enterprise" drives which cost more than an SSD). Depending on how you want to use those drives, you may be having a bad time. For example when rebuilding a ZFS pool. [0]

If your use case / setup allow you to deal with the complete loss of your array (which, granted, is not 100% likely) or don't use ZFS, then I suppose you could look at Seagate's 2.5 Barracuda line. They're relatively cheap given their capacity and I don't think they're particularly unreliable in and of themselves.

[0] There are many people talking on the internet about ZFS performance with SMR disks. Here's a quick find:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/western-digitals-smr...

[tutfbhuf]

RAID-Z2 on 4x2TB 2.5 inch HDD (without SMR) on a PI over 1 GbE sounds fine to me.

It's not super much space, but any two drives can fail, it's rather cheap and low powered + passive cooling should be possible.