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?
150$, sorry
You can buy a $400 900GB HDD, so OPs price gap is actually pretty narrow.
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.
$150.
(Also usually speed and/or capacity along with higher quality components)
Interesting, but incorrect
Assuming %0.2 Tax:
A $50 HDD would cost : $60
A $150 HDD would cost:
$180
With a difference of $160
Also reliability is basically the only thing that matters in an HDD if you are going for speed get an SSD
As a rule of thumb, if you pay more money you get a better product. With spinning drives that almost always means that more expensive drives (in average) run longer than cheaper ones. Performance is another metric, but balancing those is where the smoke and mirrors come into play. You can get a pretty darn fast drive for a premium price which will fail in 3-4 years or for a similar price you can get a bit slower drive which will last you a decade. And that’s in average. You might get a ‘cheap’ brand high-performance drive to run without any issues for a long long time and you might also get a brand name NAS drive which will fail in 2 years. Those averages start to play a role if you buy drives by a dozen.
Backblaze (among others) publish their very real world statistics on which drives to choose (again, on average), but for home gamer that’s not usually an option to run enough drives to get any benefits from statistical point of view. Obviously something from HGST or WD will most likely outperform any no-name brand from aliexpress and personally I’d only get something rated for 24/7 use, like WD RED, but it’s not a guarantee that those will actually run any longer as there’s always deviations from their gold standard.
So, long story short, you will most likely get a significantly different results depending on which brand/product line you choose, but it’s not guaranteed, so you need to work around that with backups, different raid scenarios (likely raid 5 or 6 for home gamer) and acceptable time for downtime (how fast you can get a replacement, how long it’ll take to pull data back from backups and so on). I’ll soon migrate my setup from somewhat professional setting to more hobbyist one and with my pretty decent internet connectivity I most likely go with 2-1-1 setup instead of the ‘industry standard’ 3-2-1 (for serious setup you should probably learn what those really mean, but in short: number of copies existing - number of different storage media - number of offsite copies),
On what you really should use, that depends heavily on your usage. For a media library a 5400rpm bigger drive might be better than a bit smaller 7200rpm drive and then there’s all kinds of edge cases plus potential options for ssd-caching and a ton of other stuff, so, unfortunately, the actual answer has quite a few of variables, starting from your wallet.
Some hard drives are built for 24/7 operation. They have higher MTBF ratings and longer guarantees.
Hard drives are very different. Many of them waste energy, lie in the SMART log or just are weird (spin up and down, lose speed, get incredibly hot etc.)
How does a beginner know which is which? What should I look for, and how do I know if it’s a good investment or overkill for a home setup?
For home setup you don’t care because you should have either redundancy or backup (preferably both).
So that typically means buying the cheapest HDD that’s new and from one of the established brands (Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba) that’s in the correct size for your needs, and you can afford to buy it at least twice (for the aforementioned backups or redundancy), or even thrice, and replace as soon as needed.
In other words there’s no need to speculate on how long an HDD will last, you simply replace it when needed.
Please also note that HDDs over 10 TB are starting to get increasingly replaced with enterprise models which run hotter and make more noise.
