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?
Never use SMR drives for a RAID setup. But outside of RAID, they’re probably fine.
I wouldn’t use them for anything but a low-usage backup target. Or any disk that’s written to very rarely.