What is the difference between CMR and SMR Hard Drives?

CMR hard drives, or Conventional Magnetic Recording drives, use non-overlapping magnetic tracks to store data, allowing for consistent and faster read/write performance, especially for random writes, making them ideal for general-purpose use, gaming, and RAID arrays.

This is in contrast to Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives, which use overlapping tracks to achieve higher storage density but have slower write performance due to the need to rewrite adjacent tracks when data is changed.