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!
If you say “harddrive” … do you mean actual harddrives or are you using it synonymous with “storage”? If you really talk about actual harddrives, it’s hard to even find datacenter/server harddrives below 4 TB. Usually server HDDs start with 8 or 12 TB. You can even find HDDs with 20 TB - Seagate Exos series for example, starting at around 360 Euros (ca. 400 USD).
If you’re in for a general storage, preferably SSD, that’s another issue. There is the Samsung 870 QVO (8 TB) SSD that is often advertised as “datacenter SSD” (so I assume it would run well in a server that is active 24/7), but it is currently available with a maximum of 8 TB. The 870 QVO is at ca. 70 Euros per terabyte (ca. 77 USD) which, in my experience, is the current price range for SSDs. So it has a high price seen from the outside but it’s actually fine. It’s also a one-time investment.
For selfhosting I’d go with an SSD-only setup.
From personal experience I’d say, stick with the “larger” brands like Samsung or Seagate.
I was thinking actual hard drives, not SSDs…
Okay, so … then maybe really look into the Seagate Exos drives. 20 TB should be pretty much fine for most selfhosting adventures.
I have a few of those, and while the ones I bought have worked out fine so far, I think it’s worth cautioning people that they are annoyingly loud doing basic operations.
Absolutely. They’re advertised for being used in datecenters, so I assume noise optimization wasn’t a concern for Seagate when creating those drives.
that wouldn’t be a problem for me, as my server is located in the basement. But good to know!
SSD only?
Look at Mr Moneybags over here. That would increase my cost about 400%
And no, I wouldn’t recoup that in energy cost reductions, as my oldest NAS with ancient drives only draws a few watts 97% of the time.
Sorry, I can’t hear you under my enormous piles of money! 🙃
But yeah. You should do an SSD-only setup if this is within your budget. I assume that for most of us selfhosting is just some soft of hobby. If you’re willing to spend money on the latest and cooles tech: do it. If not, then it’s fine, too.
I would advice against using SSDs for storage of media and such. Not only because of their higher price, but also because flash memory cells tend to fade over time, causing read speeds to decrease considerably over time. This is particularily the case for mostly read-only workloads. For each read operation the flash memory cell being read loses a bit of its charge. Eventually the margin for the controller to be able to read the data will be so small, that it takes the controller lots of read operations to figure out the correct data. In the worst case this can lead to the SSD controller being unable to read some data alltogether.