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?
For home setup you don’t care because you should have either redundancy or backup (preferably both).
So that typically means buying the cheapest HDD that’s new and from one of the established brands (Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba) that’s in the correct size for your needs, and you can afford to buy it at least twice (for the aforementioned backups or redundancy), or even thrice, and replace as soon as needed.
In other words there’s no need to speculate on how long an HDD will last, you simply replace it when needed.
Please also note that HDDs over 10 TB are starting to get increasingly replaced with enterprise models which run hotter and make more noise.