I recently bought a WD elements 8 terabyte. I also got a Seagate external 8 terabyte that's confirmed smr because I decided to shuck because its just for archival cold storage and I probably wont kill it before warranty ends anyway, but im keeping this one in the case for convince and warranty because I will use it semi heavily(gaming and uncompressing large files every so often, but I wont delete files and reinstall constantly). I called wd and gave the the sn and they said they don't even know what's inside. the guy said its probably a wd red and that they discontinued most smr drives. on crystal disc info it sys its a WDC WD80EDAZ-11TA3A0 8001.5 GB is this smr? is there a way to find out more without shucking? if I can find out the cache size that could give me a clue, because the cache on smr drives is usually very large to help mask all the rewriting. also, if this is smr, is it ok for gaming, I assume gaming is 95 percent reads for MOST games, there's are obviously some exceptions.