The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/immortal192 on 2025-06-09 17:49:20.
Looking for a drive for NAS server--it will be used for downloads/torrents (I'm not running a RAID setup, a single drive is fine). Currently, I use a decades-old 2.5" drive (yes, I can afford losing the data when it dies) on a Pi server. When I scrub videos (rapidly seek through random parts of the video) with it, there's a 1-2 second pause so I have to cache the video in advance (taking >=50s seconds for a 2GiB video)--not sure if it's an SMR drive or if it would be the same with playing videos from an CMR drive when it's simultaneously downloading potentially dozens of a files at a time.
There aren't any 2.5" CMR drives in the market, right? Would a 3.5" drive or a high TBW SSD would recommended for something low-power when active (since it will be active and not idle most of the time downloading) and cost-effective? I actually purchased a used Intel DC S3610 1.6TB drive as a secondary drive for more permanent storage that is idle most of the time. No issues scrubbing videos over the network with this one but I think I can do better for a drive that should be more active and potentially more cost-effective.
Any recommended drives in particular? I can shuck. My only hesitation with SSDs are limited writes since the drive will be downloading media content 24/7. And also it seems SSD's power efficiency comes primarily from being idle which wouldn't be applicable to me--when active SSD and HDDs seem more similar.
If CMR drives suffer similar video scrubbing performance lag because it's actively downloading videos simultaneously, then perhaps I should just accept that fact and upgrade host system from 16G to 32G memory to cache more videos to process.