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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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[–] Nibodhika 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

One important thing, ensure the drive is CMR, the reason is that you likely want a RAID, and non-CMR disks take so long to read the entire disk that the chances of a second failure while recovering from a disk failure is significant.

That being said, how are you keeping track of the disks state? I built my RAID recently, and your post made me realize that I have nothing to notify me if one of the disks shows early signs of problems.

[–] DeathByDenim 2 points 2 months ago

I just use the built-in email function that comes with mdadm. If a drive fails, I'll know right away and replace it with a spare. You do need your server to be able to send emails with something like postfix.

If you have hardware RAID, there's often a monitoring tool that comes with it or at the very least a command-line utility that can report the RAID state which you can then use in a script.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I don't keep track actively. I noticed problems when reading a file and looked at the drive with smartctl for that reason. Does anybody know how to keep track actively?