I cant help but notice that a lot of the (budget / home) builds emphasize the expandability of the rigs. It occurred to me this morning that if an unRAIDER has a build that can hold 12 HDs, why would they want to upgrade to a build that holds more? Wouldnt it be easier to acquire larger hard drives when they require more storage space? Then unRAID could then rebuild the array on the upgraded disk. I can see the advantages of using less power because you are running less drives or the same amount (ceteris paribus) yet you will be increasing your capacity.

 

Is the reason because you are unwilling to give up the smaller drives you need more expansion space? Or is it the lack of suitable larger drives?

 

Your thoughts..

 

a) What do you do with the old drives? Throw them away or sell them?

I think everyone has a limit whereby a drive is no longer useful. For me, I don't use anything below 500GB, but I do still have a few 500GB drives in my servers.

 

b) Some people (well, I know of one) have two servers, each of which holds up to 20x 2TB drives (80TB total). For them, the more drives a server can hold, the better.

 

Personally, I make a judgement call every time I decide to either add a disk "slot" or buy a bigger drive based on the cost of the bigger drive versus the cost of that additional slot.

I'm at two servers with 16 drives in each, and from now on, it'll be a case of just replacing drives with larger ones, not expanding the capacity of the servers to hold more drives.

Exactly.  I also draw the line at 500 GB (though I will still use a smaller drive for cache).  It is fairly difficult to sell a used, small drive, so it will likely just go to waste.  I tend to give them away to friends and relatives as externals and backup drives.  If your storage needs are modest (relative to this community, say 10 TB or less) and you don't mind accumulating old drives, then replacing drives is probably a good option.

 

I recently upgraded to a 20 drive capacity (Norco 4220) primarily because I wanted a case with all externally mounted drives.  I originally planned to build my own 10-15 bay server, but realized that the Norco 4220 was actually cheaper and had more capacity.  So even if I never use all 20 bays, I still saved money.

 

Less larger hard drives saves power, but increases your parity check/rebuild times.  That's the major tradeoff that I see.

Good point guys. neilt0, I have to agree with you. There will be a point where there will be a deciding factor if to add drives or upgrade drives, but only up to a limit where you will agree that the only way to increase capacity will be to buy larger HDs...

 

 

Smaller usually implies older.  Check the acceptable lifespan for that model, and compare that to power-on hours in SMART.  I generally retire drives at 3 years of operation.

Wouldnt it be easier to acquire larger hard drives when they require more storage space?

 

Ya well we all might hit the 3TB drive wall soon, and 2TB will be small one day. So suddenly 20 slots doesn't seem like enough.....

Wouldnt it be easier to acquire larger hard drives when they require more storage space?

 

Ya well we all might hit the 3TB drive wall soon, and 2TB will be small one day. So suddenly 20 slots doesn't seem like enough.....

It is not always that easy.  My original unRAID server still has a number of 400, 500 and 750Gig drives.  They are IDE drives.  Just try finding a 1TB IDE drive.  It is impossible, as they do not make them, so replacing a number of smaller drives with a larger one is just not practical. 

 

Hell, just try to find a 750Gig IDE drive.  They were made for a short while, and they are still available.  I can purchase a 750Gig IE drive for only $199.

Or, I can purchase a 2TB drive for just over $100. 

 

The economics of it will force me to replace the existing IDE drive tray with an SATA tray and to use a PCI based SATA controller.  (I've put a 4-port card in the box... I currently have a pair of 1TB SATA drives there.  I don't know if I'll ever want to put a 2TB drive on the PCI bus with all those IDE drives... It would take forever for a parity check.  I barely get 13MB/s with all the drives involved on that old motherboard.

 

Joe L.

 

 

 

Personally and I do mean personally spec out what you consider to be a reasonable amount of data that you are going to need of course you will eventually be wrong, but we are talking your immediate needs. I initially thought I would need at least 4TB of space. I knew I could buy a case that would house 12 or so drives and started from there. I already had (2) 1.5TB drives so I knew I would need at least 1TB of additional storage and of course I needed a Parity drive so I picked one up a 2TB.

 

As well I just happen to have a pair of 500GB drives to make up my missing 1TB of space. Now anything I buy I can buy on the cheap or spend a bit more depending on how good of a deal it is vs the space. I just picked up another 2TB drive for 99bucks because it was on sale and when I need it I have it. I've already Pre-cleared it so I know its fine and I'm not hurting for space because I have plenty on my existing array.

 

Just watch your RPM's and cost per MB and go from there. As the bigger drives come down in price you can replace your older smaller drives or keep adding additional drives until you are maxed out in drive space vs Hard Drive MB space.

Hell, just try to find a 750Gig IDE drive.  They were made for a short while, and they are still available.  I can purchase a 750Gig IE drive for only $199.

Or, I can purchase a 2TB drive for just over $100. 

 

I've got a ST3750640A with 5,146 hours on it in my server. It has no reallocated or pending sectors, and it has the IDE bus all to itself. I have no idea what it cost when I bought it, but when I do replace it, it'll be with a SATA drive, maybe on the PCI bus -- I have a 500GB SATA on the PCI bus; I could remove that drive and the 750GB IDE and still have more space overall with a new 2TB drive with no change in parity check times.