[alessandroberna]

The thing that makes the most difference is a drive being CMR vs an SMR one. CMR ones are recommended if you are ever going to write large-ish amounts of data in one go or if you ever plan to make a raid 5/ raid 6 arrays.

SMR drives are now what you find on most consumer drives between with capacities 1<x<8 tb (higher capacities too, but depends on the manufacturer) , they have a CMR area of the platter as a sort of write cache (like slc cache in ssds), while the rest of the platter will be really slow to write to. The write head is wider than the read head, so to overwrite something the drive has to first read and copy somewhere else the data on the track(s) that would be overwritten. This makes whole drive writes really slow and can kill raid 5/6 since resilvers would take very long, possibly even a month, instead of a few days.

Besides the recording technology, the color of the label and the product line name are mostly marketing and won't make too much of a difference for simple usage.

[mschild]

Fully agree on CMR being the way to go, especially for things like home servers.

The only other value might be the power on hours (POH). Effectively the intended daily running time. If youre looking for something that sits in a server, best pick something with 24h.

Beyond that I think the only other difference is warranty. I know Toshiba gives 5 years on their higher end pro models.