Beginner question: Searching for my first dedicated server setup, and I have no idea what to look for in a hard drive. I see a huge difference between drives of the same capacity, so what makes the difference? I am looking to eventually have a media server that can run “-arr” programs, Jellyfin, Immich, sync music, books, etc.

What are the factors I should be paying attention to other than capacity? Is it a lot of branding and smoke and mirrors, or will I see a significant change in performance/reliability with different drives?

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    16·
    5 months ago

    Also pay attention to SAS vs SATA. SATA drives are usually usable in SAS backplanes, but a SAS drive physically will not fit a SATA connector.

    Also avoid SMR drives. They’re very slow because their tracks are overlapping, so one write results in many writes to update the downstream sectors.

    Other than that, just pick a big name like WD, Seagate, HGST and you’ll be fine. Just buy at least one spare to have on hand, and practice 3-2-1 backups for anything you can’t afford to lose.

    • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      21·
      5 months ago

      WD, Seagate

      Has Seagate improved? After having multiple Seagate drives fail, I did some research on failure rates and Seagate was way worse than every other brand. Since then I have only been buying enterprise-grade WD drives. However, I did my research almost ten years ago and a lot could have changed since then.

      • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        5 months ago

        Yes, Seagate had a bad run of drives. But that was only certain models, and like you said, years ago. WD had a similar bad run after Seagate recovered, and currently they’re all roughly equivalent. But you can find Backblaze’s data somewhere if you want to read numbers.

        Bottom line, there’s always a failure risk, just be prepared for it.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    81·
    5 months ago

    Rpm is a thing to look at. A 7,200 drive is faster than a 4,200, but slower than a 10,000.

  • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    5 months ago

    The drives you’re seeing with the “too good to be true” pricing are what most people call “white label” drives. From what I understand, it’s either refurbished or something that didn’t pass the big-brand QC so they don’t get the brand name. Slap a white label on it and ship it.

    WD, Seagate, Toshiba will all have approximate price parity through various levels of HDDs. You can base your shopping on these prices for first quality drives. I like WD. Currently I’m running zfs raidz2 (one parity drive) on four drives. Two are WD, one Seagate, one Toshiba. No problems yet but this array has only been on for 9 months. Prior to that I had a 2-disk striped raid with 2x 4tb WD blue drives and it ran for 8 years without an error.