I’ve been buying seagate ironwolf only drives for my NAS but I’ve been wondering if it’s really worth it given that it’s a small server sitting in a corner and these drives are getting more and more expensive. What are your thoughts? Do you only go with NAS drives or anything really does the trick assuming I have a good backup strategy?
Honestly, for normal people things hard drive is hard drive. If it’s a hard-core high-performance DATABASE, always spinning ZFS pool then MAYBE it’ll matter. But for just storing data, like a normal use case, heck even a heavy normal use case like photo/video storage where you’re caching on an SSD for editing but fairly intensely reading/writing back to the drive, it’s fine.
The only time it’ll probably matter is if it’s someone else’s money, then just get the expensive drives so you don’t get blamed (enterprise), it’s some super intense database or something, or Security systems there are some benitifs for a drive designed to be CONSTANTLY written to.