Depends on what your goals are and what kind of data. I'm not a fan of greens foe a raid/nas. Lots of others use the same drives and have great results.

 

Is this a long term setup or just checking it out?  I did the check it out option and has problems. I used seagate so that may have been one of the problems. I also was learning and went through a major blackout and a bad power supply.

 

It's up to you. If I had a green field and were starting over I'd go red or a nas/raid class drive.  That's just me. Again there's quite a few enthusiasts that use greens and have smoking results. Now that drive prices are somewhat inexpensive your options are much better than 6 months ago.

 

 

Depends on what your goals are and what kind of data. I'm not a fan of greens foe a raid/nas. Lots of others use the same drives and have great results.

 

Is this a long term setup or just checking it out?  I did the check it out option and has problems. I used seagate so that may have been one of the problems. I also was learning and went through a major blackout and a bad power supply.

 

It's up to you. If I had a green field and were starting over I'd go red or a nas/raid class drive.  That's just me. Again there's quite a few enthusiasts that use greens and have smoking results. Now that drive prices are somewhat inexpensive your options are much better than 6 months ago.

 

This box is going to be THE storage solution for me (movies/music/xbox/etc). Right now i'm just running an HTPC with 2 USB external drives. I don't like the idea of having no type of protection. I've alway wanted to do a NAS so I finally decided to pull to trigger.

 

My question however was aimed at how should one go about purchasing multiples of the same drive? I've read (maybe in this thread. i forget) that you shouldn't purchase more than one of the same drive at the same time from the same retailer. I pretty much violated that rule by getting 3 WD greens from Amazon yesterday. I'm starting from scratch so I don't have any of the need parts. I understand most you guys have been up and running for a while and probably don't need to buy a bunch of the same drives in one shot. But if you do, how do you go about doing that?

 

Do you get 1 from x retailer and then one from y retailers?

Do you get 1 from x retailer, wait y days/weeks, then get 2nd drive from x retailer?

 

Kinda limited if you ask me since Amazon has the best prices right now...

There are so many good deals out there now. Newegg, Amazon, Superbiz and more that you can't go wrong.  Unless you get a bad batch.  Maybe that's why the rule of thumb exists. In my case I got a bad batch of drives.  One drive was sold as new with someone's data on the drive when I fired it up.

 

So if the issue is no more than one why?  If there's a concern for bad drives I a batch then get one at a time. If not then find the best deal and stock up while good prices still exist 

 

Seagate has a great advanced replacement program now. Where before you had to pay $10 to get a ground shipped replacement from Texas. Now that's free and the $10 fee is for 2 day shipping.  Then I recommend then constellation series's  if you like WD Go red.

 

Invest in a awesome, reliable and large parity drive. Go with 3 TB so you will not need to upgrade any time in the near future. Then I recommend a beefy cache drive. Again go large depending on the formula to calculate cache drive size needed for you average transfer rates. That will keep you on the one drive type per buy. After that your call.  Budget probably being your main factor. With a large parity drive and super fast cache drive your set for the future.

 

What controller do you plan on using?

I personally think that usage patterns of large drives may have had an impact on warranties.  I had 2 drives sitting in a DNS-323 in JBOD mode running for a few years, and that enclosure only has a 40 or 60mm fan on it, and was quite warm.  When I moved to unRAID I copied the data from the DNS-323 and then tried to preclear the disks.  Both disks didn't preclear properly, one of them started clicking on the 3rd preclear.  Both were RMA'd

 

I think there were probably a lot of users doing unexpected things with consumer level drives, like running them 24/7 without adequate ventilation causing reliability issues, so to deal with that issue they've adjusted the warranty period to compensate.  That's just my thought, as time moves forward the drives should become more reliable not less.