Re: Shingles
"As a lay person, everything I hear about shingled drives gives me the willies... I will never buy such a drive."
Don't worry. Such drives may never appear in the channel for you to buy. Millions of SMR drives have apparentlyl shipped, but apparently shipped directly to a cloud host (probably Amazon and Facebook). I can't even the find the model numbers for these drives.
Given that the big 5 (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft) account for about half of all purchased computer hardware, more and more products will simply sold directly to the customer. It kind of sucks being a distie these days.