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!

  • waldenEnglish
    12•2 months ago

    There are two types, CMR and SMR. You can read online about the differences. CMR is better because SMR tries to be all fancy in order to increase capacity, but at the cost of speed and data integrity.

    It won’t be front and center in the specs of a particular drive, but you usually find the info somewhere.

    I wouldn’t worry about higher capacity failing sooner. If you have 10x4TB vs 2x20TB, that’s 5x as many drives to go bad. So a 20TB drive would need a 5x worse fail rate to be considered worse. A pro of larger (fewer) drives is lower power consumption. 5-10 watts per drive doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up.

    • Avid AmoebaEnglish
      3•2 months ago

      I don’t think anyone makes SMR drives in the current lineups anymore.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•2 months ago

      If you are buying used datacenter drives, larger capacity drives are also likely to be newer, which tips the scales a little more in that direction.