I'm rebuilding XP on a new drive, using SATA drives in IDE compatibility mode for ease of use (also run 2000 at times) but I've noticed that the options for good drives are lessening. I'm aiming to go for 2TB for dual booting, 1TB each. The only problem here is that it's hard to get 2TB 7200RPM drives that aren't SMR. The only CMR 2TB drives I can find are 5400RPM. I see that some older WD Black drives were good, but they're all old stock by now.

So this leads to the question, is SMR vs CMR really a big deal with an XP boot drive, and if it is, is it worth downgrading to 5400RPM from 7200RPM just to get CMR? I would err on the side of the 7200RPM SMR, because recently I notice that some games like UT2004 struggle with slow drives (game sort of stops when a new sound plays for the first time) but if the pagefile is on an SMR drive, that could be problematic too. I do have 4GB RAM on this system, but I see the pagefile still gets used a bit.

SSDs have become unobtainium due to prices.