Well, I'm out of space again... and now I have a dilemma. I currently have an unRAID Plus license and all of my available HDD spaces are used.

Should I:

 

a.) Upgrade to unRAID Pro

      Buy a controller card (I'm also out of SATA ports on my mobo) I'd probably an SAS card for the speed

      Buy more 2TB drives

 

b.) Buy 2x 4TB drives (simply start replacing all my 2TB with 4TB) That would give me up to 10TB of additional storage

 

Cost-wise, it's effectively a push. But does anyone have any wisdom on the better path to take?

if you have space in the case i'd go with unraid pro and go with more drives. if you want to go from 2TB->4TB later on you can still do that.

I think unRAID PRO is the way to go for the future as it always gets the highest feature set and most drive availability.

Couple that with a sas controller card and you'll have some nice speed.

You can always go with external cases should you need the extra spindles.

 

However, Looking at your current modest setup you may not need it.

Those drives may be a bit old and/or slow and the sas card probably wouldn't boost speed much at this point with those drives.

With newer drives it'll scream.

 

I would certainly be retiring some of those drives based on size and age.

One of the newer 4TB HGST 7200 RPM drives as parity is going to give you a speed boost on writes.

add another one of those 4TB drives for your most used/read drive and you'll see a speed boost.

 

Once you see what you can accomplish, you can start swapping drives as you need.

 

I'm really not a fan of the WD EARS drives. They seem to develop weak sectors after a few years.

Based on age I would start retiring or sell them off (after copied/verified/erased).

 

So my first recommendation would be to update at least 2 drives. You would be adding more drives anyway.

From there you can determine if the next cost is worth it.

i.e. controller card and unRAID pro upgrade.

After that you can reuse the drives you've removed, or purchase newer 4tb drives.

Okey doke so I ordered 2 HGST Deskstar 4TB hdds. One will replace the 2TB EARS parity and the other will replace the oldest 2TB EARS in the array, which will make it the most used drive since my cache drive is loaded with things to move into the array. I will systematically replace the other 4 hdds in the array over the next year or two. It appears that the only other drive that I have in the SATA II category is the Samaung which I can replace next as it is also one of the older drives.

 

I appreciate your advice.

I'm pretty happy with the HGST 4TB NAS drives.

The HGST 4TB NAS drives clock from 140-175MB/s.

 

The Seagate 3TB 7200 RPM drives are a little faster if you are going for speed. i.e. The cache drive.

They clock at 190MB/s on the outer tracks.

So if you see a sweet deal on those and your goal is speed, you would benefit from it, but it's not necessary unless the cache drive is very old and/or having issue.