Storage upgrade time - suggestions?

[Medwynd]

Browsed through the various threads and been hard to nail down where I want my unraid system to go from here.  I built the system about 5 years ago with 6 3tb WD reds (WDC WD30EFRX-68EUZN0).  I upgraded my parity drive and one of the storage drives to 4TB HGST (HDN724040ALE640) because I got a deal on the pair.

 

I'm pretty full on storage with about 1.5TB still free and with the holidays here I am looking for some ideas on what to keep an eye out for.

 

All of my drives have held up remarkably, granted they dont get a ton of use, just the occasional movie and tv show viewing.  My motherboard is a Supermicro - X10SL7-F and according to Supermicros site it should be able to use 8TB drives, which would be a nice jump in space even if I only get a handful of them.

 

The obvious choices I think are Seagate IronWolf 8TB or 10 TB NAS drives or more WD Reds which have treated me right so far.  The IronWolf has a higher speed which would be nice compared to a similarly priced WD 8TB at 5400 RPM.

 

Are there any other factors I am overlooking besides just looking for a good $/TB. reliability, and speed?  Any other brands that I may not be thinking of?

 

Thanks for any advice.

[Medwynd]

Actually got lucky and decided to go with 3 x WD EasyStore 12TB Externals with WDBAMA0120HBK-NESN inside.  These are supposed to be easy to shuck and have a power button which makes them nice to reuse when I repurpose an older drive.  Got them for 175$ each, still thinking I should have went for more but I have a new pc build this Christmas I'm working on

[planetwilson]

How did you work out which ones are good for shucking? Anything to look for?