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!

  • Avid AmoebaEnglish
    2•2 months ago

    Due to risk of failure or risk of data corruption because the mirror can’t tell which drive is right when there’s a difference?

    • @turmacarEnglish
      2•2 months ago

      The second one.

      Mirroring is good for speed, but a storage mechanism with parity checks will always be more recoverable. And you will have far more storage available.

      • Avid AmoebaEnglish
        1•2 months ago

        I think data checksums allow ZFS to tell which disk has the correct data when there’s a mismatch in a mirror, eliminating the need for 3-way mirror to deal with bit flips and such. A traditional mirror like mdraid would need 3 disks to do this.

    • TheHolmEnglish
      2•2 months ago

      ZFS or BTRF mirror will know which side is at fault due to checksums. I’m more concern about simultaneous falures of two disks. Rebuilding of a RAID puts lots of pressure on remaining disks, so probability that remaining one dies too is much higher. with RAID6 3 disks need to die to lost date, which is less likely but not impossible.