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What are good harddrives to use with servers (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

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I have quite an extensive collection of media that my server makes available through different means (Jellyfin, NFS, mostly). One of my harddrives has some concerning smart values so I want to replace it. What are good harddrives to buy today? Are there any important tech specs to look out for? In the past I didn't give this too much attention and it didn't bite me, yet. But if I'm gonna buy a new drive now, I might as well...

I'm looking for something from 4TB upwards. I think I remember that drives with very high capacity are more likely to fail sooner - is that correct? How about different brands - do any have particularly good or bad reputation?

Thanks for any hints!

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

After I had two WD drives fail in my old NAS so I switched to all Seagate on my next build. Currently running 9x 20TB Exos X20, though for only about a year now, so no issues should be expected, yet.

I think the most important thing is that you pick a drive that is meant for NAS/server use (so rated for running 24/7). And having manufacturere warrenty is also nice. My Seagate drives have 60 months (which is considerably more then the 36 months that my WD drives had).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

my currently failing drive is a WD as well... 🥴 I bought it a year ago, I think...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

Switching wholesale from a brand or model to another could be counterproductive. There are myriad of reasons why drives can fail that aren't related to the brand and the model. What if you unknowingly switch to a less reliable model because of such a reason? You'd end up worse off. For example according to Backblaze's data, Seagate is generally worse than WD.

A better way to do this is to mix brands and models so that there's less probability to fail at the same time. I have both WD and Seagate in a single storage pool, even if the Seagate model is objectively less reliable according to Backblaze.