January 31, 20215 yr Hi All, My server case has enough room for eight HDDs. I have a 4TB parity drive. I'm about to the point where I'll need to add another disk to the array. My question, then: given that, at some (distant) point in the future, 7 x 4TB HDDs will not be enough storage for me, would it make more sense to (1) upgrade my parity drive now and then add the old parity to the array; (2) just keep adding 4TB disks to the array until such a time I'm forced to upgrade my parity so that I can add larger disks to the array; (3) not worry about it because the choice between (1) and (2) doesn't matter much; or (4) some other option of which I've not thought here. Thanks in advance, y'all.
January 31, 20215 yr Larger drives are more efficient in several ways, so buy the cheapest per GB skewing heavily towards the larger drive. Prices are highly location specific, so I'll give a hypothetical you can apply to your situation. Let's say 8TB drives are $20 / TB, and 10TB are $19 / TB, but 16TB are $21 / TB. Obviously you would want at least the 10TB, and if you can at all afford it, upgrade to the 16TB.
January 31, 20215 yr Author This is helpful, Jonathan, thanks. Quick follow ups: (1) I'm using an LSI 9211-8i, this should handle the larger drives fine, right? (2) The Seagate Exos drives are pretty reasonably priced (a hair over $20/TB for a 16TB drive). Do you have any thoughts on these?
January 31, 20215 yr As a very general rule, anything that handles drives larger than 2.2TB should be fine with any disk size available for a few years yet. Discussing specific drive models borders on religion, I'd google the model number and see what people are saying.
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