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!
I’d like to second the ‘manufacturer doesn’t matter, all drives are going to fail’ line, but specific models from manufacturers will have a much higher failure rate than others.
Backblaze, for example, publishes quarterly(ish?) stats showing the drives with the highest failure rates in terms of percentages, so you can kind of get a good view on if there’s a specific drive model you should maybe avoid.
Or just buy an actual enterprise drive, avoid SMR, and have backups is also a sane approach.
Do be aware that Backblaze drive access patterns will probably be quite different from yours. So if there’s a really good deal on something with a bit higher failure rate, but your usage pattern is pretty tame, it may be worth taking the gamble.
Yeah I was more referring to huge outliers, like the 4? 6? Tb seagates they had a few years ago that were like 25% Afr.
Some manufacturers have lower failure rates overall. But yes, you do have to mind the specific model.