This article might help shine some light on some questions.
USSEthernet
From what I understand, SMR is fine for NAS as long as you aren't doing a lot of reads. Like hosting a multimedia server that pulls videos and stuff from the NAS. I recently stood up a TrueNAS server a few months ago with SMR WD disks and it works fine for my use case. It's RAIDed and backed up to cloud storage. I'm now looking into standing up a media server, but I won't use that NAS storage for that.
I work in IT and I've been against the cloud for over a decade and I always got looks like I was crazy. We still have vendors pushing us to buy into the cloud, I'll fight tooth and nail all the way. Unfortunately, a lot of vendors aren't giving much of a choice anymore by making their services cloud only. We'll have to start building custom applications soon to keep everything on-prem.
The amount of downvotes on comments trying to help people not get price gouged and comments supporting these subscription price increases shows me just how many corporate shills are actually out there. No wonder these corps keep getting away with this bullshit.
Edit: Wow so many people took personal offense to this...almost like it they know it's true but are afraid to admit it. Everyone is hurting financially right now, some more than others. Yet year over year, the prices keep going up even with record inflation and record profits. Keep shilling folks, enjoy emptying your wallets for the millionaires while you struggle.
I was upset about the SMS thing as well. I also switched to Google messenger app on my phone for SMS/RCS. While they do have encryption in transit, I'm pretty sure it's not encrypted at rest on the server side like signal is.