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!

  • Max-PEnglish
    9•2 months ago

    I’ve heard very good things about resold HGST Helium enterprise drives and can be found fairly cheap for what they are on eBay.

    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?

    4TB isn’t even close to “very high capacity” these days. There’s like 32TB HDDs out there, just avoid the shingled archival drives. I believe the belief about higher capacity drives is a question of maturity of the technology rather than the capacity. 4TB drives made today are much better than the very first 4TB drives we made a long time ago when they were pushing the limits of technology.

    Backblaze has pretty good drive reviews as well, with real world failure rate data and all.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•2 months ago

      I run only used hgst. I have 6 x 3tb drives that are all 90k hour plus and I recently expanded to some new to me 12tb hgst. I always do badblocks test when I get the drive which took 4 days on the 12 tbs. One of them failed and I returned it to Amazon they shipped another and the replacement was perfect. If they package it poorly just return it right away and choose a different distributor.