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!
If you can, move to a RAID-equivalent setup with ZFS (preferred in my opinion) in order to also know about and fix silent data corruption. RAIDz1, RAIDz2 would do the equivalent to RAID5, RAID6. That should eliminate one more variable with cheap drives.
ZFS is a no go for me due to not being able to add larger disk and then expand my pool size on the fly. MDADM and LVM+XFS have treated me well the past few years. I started with an 12tb pool and now over 50 tb pool