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?
Some hard drives are built for 24/7 operation. They have higher MTBF ratings and longer guarantees.
Hard drives are very different. Many of them waste energy, lie in the SMART log or just are weird (spin up and down, lose speed, get incredibly hot etc.)
How does a beginner know which is which? What should I look for, and how do I know if it’s a good investment or overkill for a home setup?
For home setup you don’t care because you should have either redundancy or backup (preferably both).
So that typically means buying the cheapest HDD that’s new and from one of the established brands (Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba) that’s in the correct size for your needs, and you can afford to buy it at least twice (for the aforementioned backups or redundancy), or even thrice, and replace as soon as needed.
In other words there’s no need to speculate on how long an HDD will last, you simply replace it when needed.
Please also note that HDDs over 10 TB are starting to get increasingly replaced with enterprise models which run hotter and make more noise.
Many manufacturers offer product sheets. You can also use price comparison websites. They sometimes offer an easy way to look at the specs or even compare them side by side.