I agree with Mark. My take on SMR is that they're "fine" for a system drive in an office computer, where nothing much is actually stored on the computer, other than the base OS, because everything's on a network drive. I wouldn't trust them for anything beyond that. But at that point, just get a small SSD.

WD eventually published a list of which drive models used SMR vs. CMR. Naturally, the 4 6TB drives I bought last year to upgrade our home NAS were submarined SMR. I RMA'd them immediately when I found out, and WD replaced them with 8TB CMR drives at no cost to me, other than my time in rebuilding my ZFS array disk-by-disk. So I ended up with a nice bonus out of the whole ordeal, at least.