I have aboot $1200CAD to spend on drives, eh? Can anyone tell me any pros and cons to either choice? 

I'd use 3 x 8TB drives as long as you have an 8TB parity drive [Or if you're upgrading parity anyway].

 

Uses one less SATA port; uses less power; etc.

 

... a minor point (since either size will saturate a Gb network) -- the 8TB drives also have a faster data transfer rate, since they have higher platter densities [1.33TB/platter vs. 1.2TB/platter].

 

To extend a current array or build a new one ?

 

If it is an existing one, then what size is your current parity drive ?

 

If it is not a nexisting one, doe you plan on having a parity drive ?  Do you plan on having a cache drive ?  And are those in this amount ?

Thanks guys.

 

"If it is not a nexisting one, doe you plan on having a parity drive ?  Do you plan on having a cache drive ?  And are those in this amount ?"

 

Building my first unRAID. And first NAS actually. So new one with parity and no cache. One of either 4 or 8 TB would be parity.

Since one of either of the drives will be parity, I'd definitely use 3 x 8TB.

 

Although it will give you slightly less available storage than the 4 x 6TB choice [16TB vs. 18TB], you'll then be able to expand the array with additional 8TB drives.

 

... you're getting 33% more storage/SATA port with the 8TB units.

 

Now that the WD Red 8TB drives are out I'd be inclined to use them over the Seagate SMR drives, but there's big price difference.  What do others think?

I def wont be using seagates. I have only ever bought 3 in my life and they all died in a couple days or less hehe.

Too bad the Seagate's have been great for me so far, I have five of them in my monster UnRaid server, no issues far going on seven months now. When Newegg.ca has them on sale you can get them for as cheap as $249.99 or $259.99 or $279.99.

I've got two 8TB Seagates (the Archive v2), and I also have two 8TB Reds.

 

The Reds aren't great.  One arrived DOA, the replacement from WD vibrates quite badly.  The other one is working OK so far, but again nowhere near as well balanced as the 5TB Reds.  The 8TB Red smacks of HGST He8 that didn't pass it's tests.

 

I much prefer the Seagates, despite the sometimes slower performance, but that's rare.

Interesting perspective.  I've got one of the 8TB Seagates and 4 of the 8TB WD Reds and am very happy with all of them.  The Seagate is used exclusively for storing a bunch of almost entirely static data, so the SMR technology is irrelevant.  The Reds are used to store a bunch of very active data, and I've been very happy with them as well.

 

I've not had ANY issues or failures, and haven't seen any vibrational issues like HellDiverUK noted, so I can't really comment on those.    I bought the Reds simply to avoid the shingling technology for drives I knew would be very active ... but others on the forum have used a LOT of the 8TB Seagates with no issues, so it's not clear that was really necessary.

 

Bottom line:  If I was building a new server with 8TB drives, I'd use a WD Red for parity and perhaps one or two other drives (where I'd locate shares you expected to be very active); and Seagates for the other data drives that were more likely to store fairly static media files.

 

 

I have got allmost only RED's never had one fail...

 

Basically you should not listen to all of us on this, personal experiences have no statistical relevance.. If you reallt want to make a decission then check with one of the bit storage companies and look at their tests.. Basicallt there is no bad choice.

 

Imho: The Seagate SMR drives do more writes then regular drives, simply because of the mechanism.. In my head that is more wear and tear on some level...

 

You could go for a parity drive as a RED and data drives for SMR.. That is what I am doing for my archive rig..

Thanks everyone.

 

How are the Toshiba x300's if i go 6TB?