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!

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
    28·
    6 days ago

    Buy recertified enterprise grade disks from https://serverpartdeals.com. Prices were around $160/16TB the last time I checked. Mix brands and models to reduce simultaneous failure. Use more than 1-disk redundancy. If you can’t buy from SPD, either find an alternative or buy external drives and shuck them. Use ZFS to know if your data is correct. I’ve been dealing with funny AMD USB controllers recently and the amount of silent data corruption I’d have gotten if not for ZFS is ridiculous.

    • Loulou@lemmy.mindoki.comEnglish
      9·
      5 days ago

      This is incredible!

      American sites like this so rarely ship to France, or it costs a litteral fortune just in shipping, here it’s 130€ for a 12TB shipping included!

      Wow.

      I Do Not Need A 12TB Hard drive.

      I Do Not Need a 12 TB Hard drive!

      I mean or do I?

      Thanks 💖

    • pedroapero@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      5 days ago

      I use BTRFS for the same. Being able to check for and repair silent corruptions is a must (and this is without needing to read the whole drives, only the actual files). I’ve had a lot of them over the years, including (but not only) because of a cheap USB controller also.

          • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
            2·
            5 days ago

            Due to risk of failure or risk of data corruption because the mirror can’t tell which drive is right when there’s a difference?

            • TheHolm@aussie.zoneEnglish
              2·
              3 days ago

              ZFS or BTRF mirror will know which side is at fault due to checksums. I’m more concern about simultaneous falures of two disks. Rebuilding of a RAID puts lots of pressure on remaining disks, so probability that remaining one dies too is much higher. with RAID6 3 disks need to die to lost date, which is less likely but not impossible.

            • turmacar@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              5 days ago

              The second one.

              Mirroring is good for speed, but a storage mechanism with parity checks will always be more recoverable. And you will have far more storage available.

              • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
                1·
                4 days ago

                I think data checksums allow ZFS to tell which disk has the correct data when there’s a mismatch in a mirror, eliminating the need for 3-way mirror to deal with bit flips and such. A traditional mirror like mdraid would need 3 disks to do this.