Recommendations on Hard Drives for Home Server and computing

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
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First I’d like to say hello to this awesome community, love the youtube page and the forum seems full of nice people.
I would also like to apologize in advance if this was discussed before, but I went through the forums trying to find a recommendation but found no recent article on Hard Drives buying guides.

In short, I need more storage, I want to add some hard drives to my PC, and also, I might need a home server; but I’m not sure how to choose since most of the reviews I’ve seen lately say I should avoid SMR drives and the descriptions on most sites like amazon or Newegg do not state if they are using PMR, SMR or other types of technology.

I’m doing some “light” editing on 4K videos from my scuba diving trips, and SSDs storage is becoming expensive (and mostly unnecessary) for such large files.

I was looking at these drives for my internal storage, leaning towards the Seagate because of speed and Cache size:

  1. Seagate BarraCuda Pro 4TB HDD 7200 RPM 128MB Cache (ST4000DM006)
  2. Western Digital 4TB WD Blue HDD 5400 RPM 64 MB Cache (WD40EZRZ)

Are this drives good options? Should I consider something else?

I also going to need some recommendations on NAS drives, since I’m planning to add a home NAS to play my scuba diving videos and probably start something like FLEX.

I’d also like to buy some “good” drives (not necessarily expensive), because I’m planning to get better at this video thing and don’t want to buy “good enough” now and then run into bottlenecks.

And sorry if I’m being dumb, and my necessities are so basic that any drive will do, and I’m wasting everyone’s time, I just couldn’t find reliable information elsewhere.

SOME CONTEXT, NO NEED TO READ IT
I moved away from hard drives about 8 years ago, I bought my first SSD (I can’t believe I paid so much for it), and I’ve kept buying SSDs for my personal use; however, it’s getting expensive… I use my pc mostly for work and light gaming (word documents and pdfs) hence I have rarely needed more than a few terabytes of storage; however, I started scuba diving a few years ago, and I love it, to the point that I have a lot of 4K videos that I do some basic editing (if cutting unwanted parts of the video and adding some background music can be called “edit”), and I want to store them and have them readily accessible for future edits.

I’m looking at 2 main uses, first is to store most recent videos on a couple of HDD inside my PC, and second, when they start to fill, to move them to external storage such as a home NAS.

I’m currently using some “mainstream” solutions, such as a couple of old 1tb internal drives (Toshiba and Hitachi) and some external WD 10tb drive with enclosure (connects via USB) I got on amazon that is almost filled.

Thanks in advance for taking the time!

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Hard drives:
If you want performance, and heat and noise is not a concern, go for HGST/UltraStar drives.

If heat and noise matter to you (top issue for me), go with WD Red drives (lower speed, non-Pro models). Then you’ve got a hassle of reading the spec sheets to make sure you don’t get one of the hotter models, keep a close eye on the specs, and look through the list of which are SMR and which are not.

I really wouldn’t consider anything else.

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Run while you still can…

Yeah, there have been a lot of lawsuit drama about that. It turns out all of the HDD manufacturers are guilty of hiding their SMR tech drives…
But honestly it depends on what you are doing. For a basic home server storage solutions SMR should not really be any serious issue what so ever.
Honestly heavy computational tasks may cause issues when combined with smr AFAIK. The issue have been so muddied I don’t even know anymore. For a proper heavy server workloads you may want to research the individual drives, bit here’s the deal. WD have clear nomenclature that shows what drives are for what purpose. Seagate and Toshiba - not so much. Reliability wise HGST are still the king, they are still WD owned, so take that as you will.
If youa re really afraid of SMR stay away from WD red… Other than that I think WD server line is clear of SMR. Not 100% sure though.
Still it entirely depends on your needs.

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Hello and welcome!

I’ve heard the WD_Black external ‘gaming’ drives have new Ultrastar drives in them, if you don’t mind shucking enclosures. And they come in capacities up to 12TB, so you’ll likely get Ultrastar DC HC520s!

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I believe the 8 TB drives have a different drive line (DC320?) in them, but the 12 TB drives are indeed white label HC520s.

Shucking is a bit annoying, but it’s always possible to just throw an old drive back into it for less-important data.

Might be more than what OP wants to spend though if they are looking at 4 TB drives.

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The price difference on amazon is only 10%, and external drives tend to have much shorter warranties, and that’s most of the value of the drive. Manufacturers sell re-certified drives with no warranty for about half the price of retail-box units.

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I’d build a small spreadsheet to take into account:

  • the cost of a 3.5" drive bay in a nas (price of nas/bays)
  • the length of warranty
  • cost of electricity
  • raid configuration

And compute $/tb/year.

It’s very likely that a 5 drive zfs raidz/btrfs raid5 of 8T seagate 7e8 or 16T seagate exos x16 drives would take the cake.

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FWIW I second this, I’ve been happy with 4 WD reds (model WD40EFRX, CMR) in a box underneath my TV, running cool & quiet. I run Nextcloud / Emby / Samba for 3 users.

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Toshiba MG07ACA14TE ($22 TB) @ amaz0n at time of posting. Grab two, setup raid 1 and not worry about storage until 8K becomes a thing or you become intrigued by flac audio files. Acoustics is not a main concern [for me] as the speakers will function during use and fan noise will drown out the drives. Good luck with the search. (Oooor you can get the Seagate Exos 14TB TechDeals dude was brandishing when having that chat with the level1tech dude).

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