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?
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.
Never use SMR drives for a RAID setup. But outside of RAID, they’re probably fine.
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.
Any difference you personally experience between the three big brands is meaningless. For any failed HDD you have there’s going to be another person who swears by them and has had five of them running for 10 years without a hitch.
But whatever’s cheaper in your area and stop worrying. Your reliability should be assured by backups anyway not by betting on a single drive. Any drive can fail.
Backblaze regularly releases failure rate statistics of their drives, and it’s often a big enough dataset to be quite meaningful. I haven’t been keeping up with it lately, but there certainly was a period of time where there were substantial differences in the failure rates of different manufacturers.
So while you do still need to have drive failure mitigation strategies, buying more reliable devices can definitely save you time and headache in the future by having to deal with failures less frequently.
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.
