Best hard drive for plex server?

Fungal · March 30, 2019

Currently i'm running a plex server on two 5+ year old wd blues and trying to switch to one big hard drive (looking at 4tb). The hard drive I'm looking at is a WD red 4tb which is only 5400 rpm while the pro is 7200. Generally the peak video bitrate I use on my plex server is 20 mb/s with a 4k movie. If there's any other hard drives worth getting i'm open to suggestions. My number one concern is reliability, I want something that will run 24/7 for several years. Cost is also important as well.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16822236599

MindServ · March 30, 2019

I think the WD Red would do the job, read speed won't be anywhere close to a problem!

The WD Red Pro is of course a little more reliable with 5-year warranty (the regular WD Red have a 3-year warranty) but it also produces quite a bit of heat and you will need extra fans to keep it cool.

If you with "reliability" mean that you don't want to loose any data, I would rather go with two regular WD Red drives in software mirror RAID. (though it's a little more expensive..)