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
Not that I want to push ZFS or anything, mdraid/LVM/XFS is a fine setup, but for informational purposes - ZFS can absolutely expand onto larger disks. I wasn’t aware of this until recently. If all the disks of an existing pool get replaced with larger disks, the pool can expand onto the newly available space. E.g. a RAIDz1 with 4x 4T disks will have usable space of 12T. Replace all disks with 8T disks (one after another so that it can be done on the fly) and your pool will have 24T of space. Replace those with 16T and you get 48T, and so on. In addition you can expand a pool by adding another redundant topology just like you can with LVM and mdraid. E.g. 4x 4T RAIDz1 + 3x 8T RAIDz2 + 2x 16T mirror for a total of 44T. Finally, expanding existing RAIDz with additional disks has recently landed too.