# CMR vs SMR for NAS: Which Drive Should You Use?

> Choose CMR for a new general-purpose NAS, especially if the disks will participate in RAID, parity, ZFS, frequent backups or multi-user writes. Reserve SMR for deliberately narrow, low-rewrite roles outside the critical array.

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## Primary source
- [CMR vs SMR for NAS: Which Drive Should You Use?](https://cloudzat.com/cmr-vs-smr-for-nas/index.md): Clean Markdown version of the full Cloudzat guidance.

## Related Cloudzat guidance
- [CMR/SMR hard-drive checker](https://cloudzat.com/cmr-smr-hard-drive-checker/)
- [Best CMR hard drives](https://cloudzat.com/best-cmr-hard-drives/)
- [Best CMR hard drives for NAS](https://cloudzat.com/best-cmr-hard-drives-for-nas/)
- [CMR vs SMR for RAID](https://cloudzat.com/cmr-vs-smr-for-raid/)
- [CMR vs SMR for ZFS](https://cloudzat.com/cmr-vs-smr-for-zfs/)
- [CMR vs SMR for TrueNAS](https://cloudzat.com/cmr-vs-smr-for-truenas/)