Hard drives - lots of smaller or a few big?

[wayner]

I am considering building a new system and am wondering what strategy to use for hard drives.  Initially I would like 12TB of storage which gives me a fair bit of headroom.  I am aware that the parity drive has to be the biggest drive in the system.  I don't want to have more than six HDs in the system and I want to avoid having to replace a parity drive for size reasons if at all possible.  My data needs will likely grow a bit, but I don't see them going way up unless media changes drastically in the near future (ie. we go to 8K/4320p for movie files).

 

So what is the best hard drive configuation?

1. 12TB parity drive and one 12TB data drive
2. 6TB parity drive and two 6TB data drives
3. 4TB parity drive and three 4TB data drives
4. A combination of the above - such as a 6TB parity drive and 4TB data drives
5. Some other combination

I imagine that option 3 is probably the cheapest as I am only buying 16TB in total storage and 4TB is properly the sweet spot for $/TB. With my six drive limitation I can still get to 20TB in the future which is probably enough.  And by the time I get to 20TB mechancial hard drives may even be obsolete if SSDs can fall drastically in price.  And when a drive fails (and eventually they will) it will be cheaper to replace a 4TB drive than a larger drive.  But the downside to this is that I can't put in bigger than 4GB data drives without first replacing the parity drive.

 

Any opinions?

[tdallen]

My advice is to buy the largest drives that offer a reasonable price per TB.  This is especially true if you have a drive count limitation.  So, the 12TB drives are still fairly pricey but 8TB drives are a real sweetspot - I bought two 8TB WD Easystore's yesterday @ $149 each with the intent of shucking them for my next build.  In your case I'd get 3 8TB drives and call it a day, even though it exceeds your initial goal of 12TB.  If that just doesn't work for you, then a set of 6TB drives.

[trurl]

I always say fewer drives means fewer opportunities for problems.

[DZMM]

agree with @tdallen and get 3x8TB.   Yes, you might pay an extra $100 now, but you'll save yourself a lot of hassle in the future when you want to upgrade and you've lost one of your bays

[SSD]

I agree. 3x8T. The WD EasyStore 8T are the way to go. Make sure to get the NESN and not NEBB (last part of model number). NESN's are REDs, NEBBs are white labels and we already have a report of one of them failing inside a month. The NEBB's were only $129 on Black Friday, but oddly their price has skyrocketed to $299, while the NESN's have been in the $150 - $199 range pretty consistently. (BE CAREFUL - they have the same name and look identical from the outside (see below)).

 

But even $199 (where they are now) is a pretty good deal, and patience might bring down the price.

 

Looks like the NESN's are not stores now. Weird. Yesterday saw they were at $149 and planned to run out later to get (another) one. They showed in stock at the 3 BB near my house at about 3:00 or so, but when I got around to going to get them around 8:00, I read on the forums that the instore price was higher and you'd have to do a price match - that doing the in store pickup option from the BB Web Site was preferable. So I went to do that and there were none in any store anywhere near me. Said they could be picked up Dec 7 at the store. I decided to just have it shipped to my house.

 

If you are picking up from the store, get an NESN from Thailand if possible (small print on bottom of box will tell you). The Thai versions have larger cache. But the Chinese versions are good also, I have both in my array. Not sure which I'll get with mail order delivery.