I bought server drives because the price/TB was lower, and I want to give you just one hint: Server drives tend to be very loud

Backups and backups and backups, and then and only then can you trust your data is safe. I run all consumer disks, have 2x2tb ssd’s in a raid1 for user facing storage which are always powered up and mounted. I only have 2 users in total, so relatively light load. Then I have 2x8tb hdd’s which only power on once a day at most, for as long as it takes rsync to complete it’s nightly backups, then they dismount and power off. Been running this for 18 months and not had any issues. My hdd’s will last years with their current load and usage, with only probably a few hundred mb written every night. But if your data is managed and backed up sensibly, and you use raid effectively, cheap discs aren’t a worry.

In my experience, all that truly matters is that the drive is on the right recording technology (CMR, SMR, and maybe someday HAMR will be in the hands of us consumer plebs).

There are two reasons to care:

1. SMR has horrible write speeds. Data can read off the drive at the same speed as a CMR drive, but writes will be unbelievably slow.
2. More importantly, for some reason or another (I assume the write speed), SMR drives might get rejected by ZFS. There was some pretty loud talk about it several years ago, but I haven’t heard much since and do not know if this is still true (I assume it is).

If your use case involves only ever writing a small amount of data, point 1 doesn’t matter very much. If you’re using software which doesn’t care about CMR/SMR, point 2 doesn’t matter very much.

If either point 1 or 2 matter to you, then you should go with CMR drives. If neither matter, you may go with SMR drives if you so chose.

PS: Both WD Blues and Seagate Barracudas are (often) CMR. Seagate consult this page: https://www.seagate.com/products/cmr-smr-list/. WD lists SMR/CMR on their website when you look up the part number.

In my home NAS, I use ZFS and have ran all sorts of drives through it. It’s ran old consumer drives I’ve pulled out of scrap hardware, it’s ran NAS-grade drives, and it’s ran enterprise-grade drives… And since they’re all CMR, I can’t say there was much if any difference at all.

The only difference between the tiers that I find interesting/useful is the number of metrics you can pull off the drive. The fancier ones spit more metrics which could help you detect signs of failure earlier, but that requires knowing what to look for.

So at the end of the day, as long as the drive’s recording technology works with your software, you’re fine.

RE: External drives (seen in a comment)

External drives can be a great way to get disks for cheap, however they are loot boxes. What drive you get inside of them depends on the capacity, the manufacturer, and pure luck. You can generally look up the model number and see what people have said is inside, then hope you get whatever they got. (Generally, manufacturers don’t often change what they put in there, but they do change over time.)

I’ve got some Western Digital and Samsung HDDs I bought refurbished a while ago in a RAID10 configuration for 4 TB total. Recently setup backups to that and an SSD, the read/write speeds are slow but tolerable and I’m not doing anything that needs high throughput. For backups from multiple machines, it does the job and I make sure to upload the encrypted backups to remote storage once a month so if there’s any catastrophic data loss on my end it’s all recoverable.

First and most important:

In the context of long-term data storage
ALL DRIVES ARE CONSUMABLES

I can’t emphasize this enough. If you only skim the rest of my post, re-read the above line and accept it as fundamental truth. “Long-term” means 1+ years, by the way.

It does not matter what type of drive you buy, how much you spend on it, who manufactured it, etc. The drive will fail at some point, probably when you’re least prepared for it. You need to plan around that. You need to plan for the drive being completely useless and the data on it unrecoverable post-failure. Wasting time and money to acquire the fanciest most bulletproof drives on the market is a pointless resource pit, and has more to do with dick-measuring contests between data-hoarders.

Knife geeks buy $500+ patterned steel chef’s knives with ebony handles and finely ground edges and bla bla bla. Professional kitchens buy the basic Victorinox with the plastic handle. Why? Because they actually use it, not mount it on a wall to look pretty.

The knife is a consumable, not an heirloom. So are your storage drives. We call them “spinning rust” for a reason.

The solution to drive failure is redundancy. Period.

Unfortunately, this reality runs counter to the desire to maximize available storage. Do not follow the path of desire, that way lies data loss and outer darkness. Fault-tolerant is your watchword. Component failure is unpredictable, no matter how much money you spend. A random manufacturing defect will ruin your day when you least expect it.

A minimum safe layout is to have 2 live copies of data (one active, one mirror), hot standby for 1 copy (immediate swap-in when the active or mirror fails), and cold standby on the shelf to replace the hot standby when it enters service.

Note that this does not describe a specific number of disks, but copies of data. The minimum to implement this is 4 disks of identical storage capacity (2 live, 1 hot standby, 1 on the shelf) and a server with slots for 3 disks. If your storage needs expand beyond the capacity of 1 disk, then you need to scale up by the same ratio. A disk is indivisible - having two copies of the same data on a disk does not give you any redundancy value. (I won’t get into striping and mucking about with weird RAID choices in this post because it’s too long already, but basically it’s not worth it - the KISS principle applies, especially in small configurations)

This means you only get to use 25% of the storage capacity that you buy. Them’s the breaks. Anything less and you’re not taking your data longevity seriously, you might as well just get a consumer-grade external drive and call it a day.

Buy 4 disks, it doesn’t matter what they are or how much they cost (though if you’re buying used make sure you get a SMART report from the seller and you understand what it means) but keep in mind that your storage capacity is just 1 of the disks. And buy a server that can keep 3 of them online and automatically swap in the standby when one of the disks fails. Spend more money on the server than the disks, it will last longer.

Remember, long-term is a question of when, not if.

I buy consumer grade drives. I’ve had some fail over the years. It’s inevitable no matter if you spend money on consumer grade or server grade. @NaibofTabr@infosec.pub @infosec.pub pretty much gives a succinct breakdown of the situation further down in this thread. I’m pretty fastidious about backing up my data. I’ve been burned a couple times, nothing earth shattering, but it’s enough to do a proper 3,2,1 scenario for all data. And I treat my drives well. Each drive bay has it’s own cooling fan. I keep an eye on the S.M.A.R.T status as well. But even all of that isn’t going to save you from a crash.

Recently, I tried to revive a friend’s 4 tb external he stored all his pictures on. He is a photographer. The first thing I asked was, where’s your backup? What backup? Well, he’s now got a 4 bay NAS, doing RAID, and backing up nightly in a 3,2,1 schema. It just takes once for most people.

Now is a bad time to buy hard drives price-wise. Massive price gouging going on with all storage pre-sold based on IOUs to “AI” companies.

If you must…

Buy used enterprise drives with a ~5 year warranty. In US there is serverpartdeals and goharddrives. I am not sure of the Europe equivalents but I am sure they exist. The enterprise drives should be cheaper than new drives and will last longer; they’ve been used out of their early failure bathtub curve but they’re young enough to be given a 5 year warranty. Make sure to get ones with SATA connectors not SAS, you’ll need a PCIe card to talk to the SAS ones, and maybe something for power idk.

They should be cheaper - I am not sure if price uncertainty has upended that.

Enterprise drives are louder, I have them in a quiet case with sound dampening padding (fractal define) and I do not hear them 5 feet away.

I have heard bad things about consumer drives longevity. I used several 1 TB barracudas for years with no issues in a server setting, I used 3 TB barracudas in a server setting and one failed early. I used a 4 TB Toshiba that failed early and I used an 8 TB blue that is fine in a personal computing setting. I have bought enterprise drives and none have an issue yet.

It seems luck of the draw, so the thing to maximize is cheapest per GB.

Never use SMR disks in a RAID/NAS. You’re taking a huge gamble on data loss / disk failures if you do. Also it will be slow as fuck, really fucking slow, often unusable for anything but incredibly slow backups.

CMR disks are the ONLY way to go.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.

[Thread #114 for this comm, first seen 24th Feb 2026, 09:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Either plan is fine.

I’d go for the second option. Just make sure they are not from the same production run with similar history (operating hours) as it would increase the chance of both failing at the same time.

You can also check eBay for enterprise HDDs with 90+ remaining SMART values. They are far cheaper than new and usually fine.

I have Seagate Barracuda drives in my NAS because I didn’t know about CMR vs SMR before I bought them.

2 of them are backups, the other spins all the time. The bulk of my storage is video files with infrequent adding of new stuff. The active drive has qBittorrent seeding from it 24/7 so it can be a bit noisy.

Other than that, you’ll see lower transfer speeds from SMR drives but nothing to worry about if it’s small writes or infrequent copying of large video files. It also takes an age to run a long SMART self test - 18hrs on an 8TB HDD that is 75% full (this’ll get worse as it gets closer to full).

So SMR drives aren’t ideal but they’ll do the job for a “write once, read many times” style of storage. I wouldn’t buy them at all for a RAID setup. If you can, you’d be better buying refurbished enterprise drives but I have no idea what availability there’ll be where you are.