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!
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2024/
Interesting that Toshiba/Seagate has best 16TB stats and WDC bad ones in comparison, but for 14TB it’s reversed. My homelab disks apparently has 0.71% risk of dying after 22 months (seagate exos x16 st16000nm001g).
edit: WDC does good in 16TB too, their only outlier there could be due to low number of disks.
Those 14TB WD drives are workhorses. I run refurbished ones in my home server and have never had any issues. And they are significantly faster than the rest of my spinning rust drives.