thank you for your detailed answer! Quick questions -
- Your links for the CMR list says Barracuda has 1 TB in CMR and others in SMR. So that would mean this one is definitely SMR, right? - ST2000LM015 - https://www.amazon.ca/Seagate-Barracuda-2-5-Inch-Internal-ST2000LM015/dp/B01LX13P71
- Funnily enough, an IronWolf 4 TB CMR is a tad cheaper than a Barracuda 2 TB SMR. Why would that be? - https://www.amazon.ca/Seagate-IronWolf-Internal-Hard-Drive/dp/B09NHV3CK9/142-0881699-7695956
- I reckon these drives won't ship with external tooling so I could move data around... what's my best bet to remove and clone? I have a MacBook Pro with a bunch of USB-C ports... Or would I be better off running a live distro of Linux on that Windows desktop and just using dd inside there?
I agree that more storage is better than less. I have an external drive that's 14 TB and I couldn't be happier with it!

The quick result looks like this -