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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150$, sorry
I was gonna say I’ve never seen a price gap that wide
You can buy a $400 900GB HDD, so OPs price gap is actually pretty narrow.
Forget the price. I’ve never seen a 900GB drive.
It’s a common enterprise size
Why not 1 tb?
For SSDs, enterprise-tier drives typically set aside a lot more dedicated space for wear management. So in many cases, it’s actually a 1TB (or 2 -> 1.8T, etc) drive, but the disk controller/firmware only allows addressing a subset of the “true” capacity.
Likely the same deal with the platter drives too.
$150.
(Also usually speed and/or capacity along with higher quality components)
Some hard drives are built for 24/7 operation. They have higher MTBF ratings and longer guarantees.
Hard drives are very different. Many of them waste energy, lie in the SMART log or just are weird (spin up and down, lose speed, get incredibly hot etc.)
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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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.
Never use SMR drives for a RAID setup. But outside of RAID, they’re probably fine.
Rpm is a thing to look at. A 7,200 drive is faster than a 4,200, but slower than a 10,000.
jots down notes
Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh, numbers…in…ascending…order.
Got it.
10,000 and 15,000 rpm drives were made obsolete by SSDs and were discontinued several years ago. They are slower than many modern 7,200 rpm drives.
As someone that works at a storage devices company - we do still manufacture 10K HDDs. They are faster than the 7200s of the same spec, by nature. All 2.5” drives for enterprise systems. And will actually continue selling them until ~2030. That said, they’re all but obsolete at this point, and aren’t really being developed on any more.
