this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago (10 children)

Also pay attention to SAS vs SATA. SATA drives are usually usable in SAS backplanes, but a SAS drive physically will not fit a SATA connector.

Also avoid SMR drives. They're very slow because their tracks are overlapping, so one write results in many writes to update the downstream sectors.

Other than that, just pick a big name like WD, Seagate, HGST and you'll be fine. Just buy at least one spare to have on hand, and practice 3-2-1 backups for anything you can't afford to lose.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 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] 2 points 2 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.

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