Multiple drives of a lower (1-2tb) capacity might be more expensive, but they’d technically be more resistant to a single failure over fewer larger (4tb+) drives when in a pool/array.
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Get them as big as possible (wallet allows to), because you’ll get quickly annoyed at having multiple smaller drives. You’ll have to deal with more space, more cables, more power, more sata expansion, more heat etc.
And more chances of failure. The benefit is less time to repair a RAID set
Price is king for me! I optimize for lowest price per TB with good quality drives.
Large drives. 1-2TB are dysproportionally expensive, you need an expensive mainboard to connect a bunch of them. More drives means more failures…
Enough to make a RAID 6. As few as possible.
I think it depends on what you’re storing. If it’s video then you’ll want bigger drives because you’ll fill your array of small drives up quickly and trying to manage 10 or 15 1TB HDDs will get out of hand quickly. Backing up isn’t super critical with large “Linux ISOs” since you can just torrent most everything again to replace missing files.
For fast throughput of small files, I think smaller drives in an array win out and if these are important files, it probably wouldn’t be too expensive to buy a couple of large HDDs to backup the entire array.
Larger drives, because less power consumption.
Also less overall failures to deal with, if you have 10 drives vs 2 drives the chance of failure is higher.
Especially with 12TB drives being under $100 now for refurbs.
Where do you buy refurbished HDD?
More drives also equals larger power consumption so you would need a larger battery backup.
It also means more components prone to failure which increases your chance of losing data. More drives means more moving parts and electrical connections including data and power cables, backplanes, and generated heat that you need to cool down.
I’d be more concerned over how many failures you’re seeing that makes you think smaller drives would be the better option? I have historically used old drives from ebay or manufacturer refurbs, and even the worst of those have been reliable enough to only have to replace drives once every year or two. With RAID6 or raidz2 you should be plenty secure during a rebuild to prevent data loss. I wouldn’t consider using a lot of little drives unless it’s the only option I had or if someone gave them away for free.
More drives mean more heat and more power usage. Better to have two large with parity enabled. The chances of both failing is very rare. Should be using an online backup service like backblaze or having a plan to take a copy off-site.
Yup, already keep an off-site copy of the important stuff via Hetzner but my Linux ISOs are the big data hogs
The chances of both failing is very rare.
If they’re sequential off the manufacturing line and there’s a fault, they’re more likely to fail around the same time and in the same manner, since you put the surviving drive under a LOT of stress when you start a rebuild after replacing the dead drive.
Like, that’s the most likely scenario to lose multiple drives and thus the whole array.
I’ve seen far too many arrays that were built out of a box of drives lose one or two, and during rebuild lose another few and nuke the whole array, so uh, the thought they probably won’t both fail is maybe true, but I wouldn’t wager my data on that assumption.
(If you care about your data, backups, test the backups, and then even more backups.)
