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] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks 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] 8 points 3 weeks ago (3 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 3 weeks ago (2 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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".

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