this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
72 points (96.2% liked)

Selfhosted

40708 readers
495 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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 are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's impossible to tell how meaningful Backblaze's numbers are because we don't know the global failure rate for each model they test, so we can't calculate the statistical significance. Also there are other factors involved like the age of the drives and the type of workload they were used for.

buying more reliable devices can definitely save you time and headache in the future by having to deal with failures less frequently.

That's a recipe for sorrow. Don't waste time on "reliability" research, just plan for failure. All HDDs fail. Assume they will and backup or replicate your data.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

All SSDs will die too. Not saying you meant or implied that they wouldn't, just clarifying for anyone who may not be aware. You're spot on with "plan for failure".

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

It's not that Seagate improved (which it may have), it's more that WD has noticeably declined. It's not a race to the bottom (yet), but there's effectively no competition any more, so they aren't incentivised to improve quality.