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?
You can buy a $400 900GB HDD, so OPs price gap is actually pretty narrow.
Forget the price. I’ve never seen a 900GB drive.
It’s a common enterprise size
Why not 1 tb?
For SSDs, enterprise-tier drives typically set aside a lot more dedicated space for wear management. So in many cases, it’s actually a 1TB (or 2 -> 1.8T, etc) drive, but the disk controller/firmware only allows addressing a subset of the “true” capacity.
Likely the same deal with the platter drives too.