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!

Max-P
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I’ve heard very good things about resold HGST Helium enterprise drives and can be found fairly cheap for what they are on eBay.

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?

4TB isn’t even close to “very high capacity” these days. There’s like 32TB HDDs out there, just avoid the shingled archival drives. I believe the belief about higher capacity drives is a question of maturity of the technology rather than the capacity. 4TB drives made today are much better than the very first 4TB drives we made a long time ago when they were pushing the limits of technology.

Backblaze has pretty good drive reviews as well, with real world failure rate data and all.

@gm0n3y@lemm.ee
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I run only used hgst. I have 6 x 3tb drives that are all 90k hour plus and I recently expanded to some new to me 12tb hgst. I always do badblocks test when I get the drive which took 4 days on the 12 tbs. One of them failed and I returned it to Amazon they shipped another and the replacement was perfect. If they package it poorly just return it right away and choose a different distributor.

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