Is there any downside to large vs small HDD?


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I'm in the process of designing my first server that is mainly going to be for plex. I saw a special on some 18TB HDDs and was planning on starting with two of them (one being a parity drive). Is there anything wrong with starting out that way? I also am trying to decide if getting a motherboard with 8 SATA ports vs 6 SATA ports is worth it vs getting a M2 to SATA card down the road (especially if I plan on purchasing large capacity HDDs in the future). Any guidance would be helpful. Thank you very much in advance. 

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I always recommend fewer larger drives instead of more smaller drives. More drives require more hardware, more power, at some point more license. Each drive is an additional point of failure.

 

Larger drives typically perform better than smaller drives due to increased data density.

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Here's some stuff I could think of.

 

Small drives:

Pros

Shorter parity check times

Shorter rebuild times

More distributed files (less chance of thrashing)

 

Cons

Louder

More power hungry

Slower read/write speeds

 

Large drives:

Pros

Quieter

Less power hungry

Faster read/write speeds

 

Cons

Shorter parity check times

Longer rebuild times

Less distributed files (more chance of thrashing)

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