Question How many 4TB drives should I buy, 2, 4, 6, 8?

[mikeford]

Later today my new 4 bay NAS arrives, its the last day of a 5% ebates, and the vendor offers 10% discount for 4+ drives. Logic suggests then that I buy 4 drives, but only at first glance. Looking at my main PC and poking around the office I find I may have misjudged my current storage level due to the remains of two system fails, first are 3x Seagate 2TB drives refurbed under warranty due to a controller board issue, and "I think" unused since, more recently a motherboard issue took out my system with 2x 3TB and 2x2TB, and I sort of forgot about the 2x 2TB since the new motherboard only had 4x SATA instead of 6x, and now I am thinking those drives have stuff on them just not often used stuff, so "maybe" I've used some appreciable fraction of 10TB.

Goal is to shift bulk of storage out of my main system into my soon to be 3x NAS units, with either one of NAS or a large single drive external as rarely connected mirror. Repurposing drives, and shuffling around drives and data will require a fair amount of data moving and space to redundantly move it. NAS population is currently 2x 3TB, 2x 1TB, and 4x 0TB.

I do see some benefit in buying one or two drives to match either the Seagate 2TB or WD Red 3TB and putting them in yet another NAS (they are dirt cheap new old stock Lenovo), but long term I know its wiser to focus on larger size, 4 TB HGST refurbs for the NAS and maybe a single bay 12TB ext USB for an additional mirror as well as initial data moving.

 

[VirtualLarry]

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Get one or two of these for "cold" backups and archival storage.

And if you have the chance, get at least 5x 4TB refurb drives for the NAS. (I try to always have at least one "cold spare" around... or current backups.)

 

[mikeford]

I opted for 6x 4TB, exactly how I use them won't be clear until they arrive and I do at least a first pass on testing them. If they are all good, all will go into something.

The Raid5 discussion soured me on using it due to URE issues, so I could easy go JBOD with 2, 3, or 4 drives in the PX4, and 12TB should be no more than 75% capacity even with all the drives I have laying around with potential data on them.

Second IX2 with 2x 1TB was purchased with the idea of pulling those drives for PC use and putting in larger drives, could be 2x 3TB Seagates or 2x of the 4TB HGST refurbs.

Something like the EZstore is what I have in mind for the rarely used last mirror stage, but unless the shuffling around of files demands it, I'll wait a bit to buy.