So, looking for opinions.  Running 5.0.4 (recent upgrade which was the smoothest upgrade I've ever completed thats for sure...well done guys) and still have an old 2 TB parity drive.

 

I'm thinking I'd like to allow expansion of disk size in the future, so that means upgrading my parity drive now.  I have been unable to find anything that states 4 TB drives are supported (especially since the forum search requires each word in the search parameters to be at least 2 characters) but I assume they are supported.

 

So what has everyone been buying?  4 TB reds?  3 TB's still?  I have a mix of seagate and western digital (mainly western digital).  My one seagate is a 1.5 TB that i would probably swap out for my 2 TB parity drive once i have IT replaced.

 

Then of course that brings up another idea I had to replace system board/proc as it is a couple of years old, but I have noticed the prototype builds have not been updated in a while and most of the boards are discontinued etc.  http://greenleaf-technology.com/3-9-drive-prototypes/

 

I assume its a non stop job trying to find solid boards that meet your requirements.  Have you found a decent board for a small 5 disk unraid server that works well?  A nice budget type build?

 

Assuming i can get my wife to approve my purchases that is. 

Unraid 5.0 supports hard drives greater than 2.2 tb. Make sure your hardware does as well.

 

Check out the q25 builds in the unraid compulsive design section.

Read here. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=29670.0

 

My requirements are like yours right now. 6 drives would do me well. I'd build a system with this case to see space.

Yes, 4TB drives are supported.  The "magic number" is 2TB ... if the system supports larger drives, then there's no restriction [actually there is, but it's at 8,000,000 TB, so you're not likely to encounter it anytime soon  ]

 

I'd use a 4TB WD Red or Seagate NAS drive for your parity drive.    Note that the 5TB WD Reds were due for release last month, but are clearly late.  If you don't need to upgrade immediately, you may want to wait a few weeks to see if they become available -- then you could use a 5TB parity drive and your array could be up to 25% larger !!

 

At what cost  ?

 

Talking about 5TB ...

At what cost ?

 

Hard to say, but I doubt it will be much of an increase in $/TB

 

My guess is the initial pricing of the 5TB units will be ~ $250 or so

 

At what cost ?

 

Hard to say, but I doubt it will be much of an increase in $/TB

 

My guess is the initial pricing of the 5TB units will be ~ $250 or so

 

I hope that is true, my experience is that manufacturers charge 'premium' for anything new! Let's see ... and be pleasantly surprised ?

At any rate, it should drive smaller sized hard disks down in price too.

Thanks guys.  Good info. 

You can also look at the link in my sig for my build thread detailing a relatively budget build based on the case mentioned earlier.

At any rate, it should drive smaller sized hard disks down in price too.

 

Over here disk prices are still not on the 2010 level ... (as in $/MB)

Looks like part of the decision was taken from me.  I had 2 bad 2 TB drives that I just sent back to Western Digital as an RMA, and they sent me 3 TB drives to replace them.  Looks like I'll be swapping out my parity drive soon!

That's not uncommon these days.  In fact, it's gotten to the point where I'm disappointed if WD actually replaces a drive with the same size I sent them !! 

 

The last 3 drives I had to RMA (in the last year or so) were a 500GB laptop unit (they replaced it with a 1TB drive);  and 2 1.5TB WD Blacks ... they replaced one with a 2TB drive, the other with a 3TB drive 

Hey guys-

 

I could have sworn I saw a post that said that the wdidle was not required on 3 TB Western Digital drives but hell if I can find it now.  Is this the case?  Or do I have to run wdidle?

 

thanks

al

There's no need to run it on any of the 3TB or 4TB drives.

 

Thanks!