Question 1

Historically PMR Drives have had some latency issues. Can you feel the lag time with this drive vs conventional platter drives at the same speed?

Accepted Answer

Perpendicular Magnetic Recording drives are the industry standard and have been the only technology in use aside from SMR for years.
SMR drives are the ones that have performance issues when handling random writes to the disk.
Shingled Magnetic Recording is best used for large sequential data transfers as the drive must read-modify-write each time a track is changed because of SMR. Normal operation would be to simply write the data. On SMR drives over writing data requires that it must be read first then modified and then finally written. This is due to the fact that part of the area you wish to write to contains data from another track. Thus both tracks must be re-written.

The drives on this page use CMR/PMR which has no performance penalty and is the preferred technology if you want a disk that does not suffer from poor random write performance.

Question 2

Is this a good drive to get for a regular use PC? Currently, I have 3TB but it's almost all used up and I need more storage. I accidentally bought a NAS HDD and doesn't work with my current set up.

Accepted Answer

This is probably overkill for use in your PC. This drive is designed for 24/7/365 use. It is an enterprise level drive. And typically, enterprise drives cost more per GB. You could get by with a drive built for consumer use. That said, you can use this in your PC and it should work fine. 
Keep in mind, this is a 3.5” drive. This will not fit in a laptop, and most PCs are being built with 2.5” SSD drives or NVMe drives. Check your system to make sure you have the correct configuration for this.

Question 3

Would it be an issue to run two of these with two 7200 RPM WD Red Pro 8TB drives in a RAID 5 configuration?

Accepted Answer

These drives will work fine in any RAID configuration.  However, keep in mind that running two drives in a RAID 5 configuration is exactly the same as running in a RAID 1.

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