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!
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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.
Damn I just put 32 more TBs in my homelab and wish I would have known about this site.
Holy cow these are way cheaper than anything I have seen before. I am in a RAID 5 setup so if a disk or two dies I am okay.
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
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 💖
Get more drives, run higher redundancy 💪
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.
I’d like to second the ‘manufacturer doesn’t matter, all drives are going to fail’ line, but specific models from manufacturers will have a much higher failure rate than others.
Backblaze, for example, publishes quarterly(ish?) stats showing the drives with the highest failure rates in terms of percentages, so you can kind of get a good view on if there’s a specific drive model you should maybe avoid.
Or just buy an actual enterprise drive, avoid SMR, and have backups is also a sane approach.
Do be aware that Backblaze drive access patterns will probably be quite different from yours. So if there’s a really good deal on something with a bit higher failure rate, but your usage pattern is pretty tame, it may be worth taking the gamble.
Yeah I was more referring to huge outliers, like the 4? 6? Tb seagates they had a few years ago that were like 25% Afr.
Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families’ reliability isn’t worth it if you’re dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.
Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.
Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.
Under US$15/TB is typically a ‘good’ price.
For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.
I’d start with Backblaze’s 2023 drive report
One thing no one will tell you HOW LOUD some HDDs could get under load. You may not want any of those disks around if you’re keeping your server around your living spaces.
Just check dB values in the spec sheets.
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.
I’m looking for something from 4TB upwards.
If you say “harddrive” … do you mean actual harddrives or are you using it synonymous with “storage”? If you really talk about actual harddrives, it’s hard to even find datacenter/server harddrives below 4 TB. Usually server HDDs start with 8 or 12 TB. You can even find HDDs with 20 TB - Seagate Exos series for example, starting at around 360 Euros (ca. 400 USD).
If you’re in for a general storage, preferably SSD, that’s another issue. There is the Samsung 870 QVO (8 TB) SSD that is often advertised as “datacenter SSD” (so I assume it would run well in a server that is active 24/7), but it is currently available with a maximum of 8 TB. The 870 QVO is at ca. 70 Euros per terabyte (ca. 77 USD) which, in my experience, is the current price range for SSDs. So it has a high price seen from the outside but it’s actually fine. It’s also a one-time investment.
For selfhosting I’d go with an SSD-only setup.
do any have particularly good or bad reputation?
From personal experience I’d say, stick with the “larger” brands like Samsung or Seagate.
I was thinking actual hard drives, not SSDs…
Okay, so … then maybe really look into the Seagate Exos drives. 20 TB should be pretty much fine for most selfhosting adventures.
I have a few of those, and while the ones I bought have worked out fine so far, I think it’s worth cautioning people that they are annoyingly loud doing basic operations.
SSD only?
Look at Mr Moneybags over here. That would increase my cost about 400%
And no, I wouldn’t recoup that in energy cost reductions, as my oldest NAS with ancient drives only draws a few watts 97% of the time.
Sorry, I can’t hear you under my enormous piles of money! 🙃
But yeah. You should do an SSD-only setup if this is within your budget. I assume that for most of us selfhosting is just some soft of hobby. If you’re willing to spend money on the latest and cooles tech: do it. If not, then it’s fine, too.
At home I use two Toshiba MG09ACA18TE’s and they work like a charm. I’ve bought them at around US$20/TB and it was the best price/TB offer at that time.
At work we use Exos X18’s and Exos X20’s without any problem at all.
