New HDD - a few 3TB or many 2TB drives? Reliability & speed?

[giantbucket]

I'm starting to look at replacing / updating my hard drives since I'm running low on storage. my OS is on a 128G SSD, so the HDD are purely for music/video/document raw storage.

my mobo has 5 SATA ports (2 of which are already used, SSD + DVD), and i've got a 4-port expansion card that's not being used. so, i have 7 available SATA ports for drives. yes, i currently DO have some HDD (a pair of 1.5T), but the data can be migrated if i decide to ditch them.

from a data reliability standpoint, is it right to think that many small drives is more reliable? meaning, if one drive starts to fail, it only affects the small amount of data on that one drive. then again, a large drive is more likely to be the most current generation, so maybe it evens out?

and from a speed / access time standpoint, more drives = more platters and more read heads, so does that mean quicker access to file X?

bottom line - what's the most sensible way to increase my storage, knowing i can handle up to 7 SATA hard drives (i have enough ports, enough space in the case, and power supply can manage it too esp since WD Green are only 5W each)? i have two 1.5T drives now (old 7200.11, nearly full). add four or five of 1T or 2T drives? swap in a few 3T or 4T drives (ditching the 1.5T in the process)?

i don't do RAID. just separate drive letters. a few years ago i thought my 1.2T of total storage was LOTS. now 3T is full. i tend to keep things unchanged for 2-5 years, and my machine is on 24/7 (but is allowed to idle when it needs to, i just don't power-down daily).

and lastly - i've been considering going with WD Greens. cheap, low power, and hopefully quiet.

 

[popatim]

Greens are a good choice from your description.
Since you don't do raid then more read heads has no real impact for you and since you will backup important data that you dont want to lose then a drive failure has no real impact on you either. So in your shoes I would research reviews and get the most reliable drive you can afford in the size you want.

Greens are a good choice and are quiet. (I have two 2TB in my homeserver) I don't trust any of the 4tb drives yet and have two 3tb drives in testing mode (Seagates) currently.

 

[Recycled]

Preamble:

I'm typing this on a laptop sitting on a rackmount that has x1 500GB boot drive, x3 1.5TB data drives, x2 2TB data drives, and then next to the rack mount in my entertainment center I have x6 2TB hard drives.

I have nothing against 3TB+ drives, it's just that XP refused to recognize anything larger than a 2TB internal drives (it's fine with large USB drives) and my HDMPs (High-Definition Media Players) refuse to recognize any USB drive larger than 2TB.

My internal data drives and 3 of my HD Media Player drives are backed up off site. Back ups for the other 3 media player drives are sitting behind a wall of monitors in the other room, waiting for transport to my off-site location (a friend's house who loves to browse my sci-fi ebook and sci-fi tv series collections.)

Solution:
1. If You have the space and power in Your PC, use what You have. In other words, install the 2x1.5TB internal drives and use them.

2. Back it up to a USB drive, or plan on loosing it. (Also, clone Your boot drive!) This means buying at least one $100 3TB USB drive.

I considered buying a 3TB internal, and using the 2x1.5TB drives as backups, but it's not worth the added cost of 2 USB drive cases.

3. When adding new drives, use 3TB or 4TB (a mix of the largest available, and the best bang-for-the-buck, depending on Your budget and how much You hate running out of drive bays or SATA connectors.) Remember to buy backup drives when You buy new data drives, or plan on loosing the data.

--Andy

 

[giantbucket]

i've got OS backups taken care of 3 ways over, but data takes up too much space to make backups affordable at this point - or at least it'll be a stretch to purchase enough HDD space to store current+pending data AND backups of it all.

so, if the cost-per-GB (or cost-per-TB) is nearly the same between a 1TB drive and a 3TB drive (hey, stuff goes on sale randomly, or the price difference is less than a coffee), then would i be better off with 6 of 1TB drives, or 2 of 3TB drives? i'm thinking PURELY from a reliability standpoint. or does the MTBF / failure rate end up being the same since i've got a total of 6TB of storage anyways?

i've got the space to accommodate the drives - i guess when i originally bought the case i wanted to future-proof myself as much as possible.

and if/when i do decide to do backups of the media, i'd likely keep those drives in my safe or outside the home somewhere anyways, so case capacity would be moot.

 

[Recycled]

In theory, more drives mean more failures. In theory,more drives allow storage parallelism, which increases the speed under heavy loads.

In my experience, You are better off with x2 3tb drives because it keeps things simpler, and prevents human errors. I have lost far more data to my fumble fingers and failing mind than I have lost to hardware failures.

You didn't ask, but avoid RAID. It complicates things and greatly increases human errors. In big data centers, they hae lots of experiene and cool data recovery tools for failed RAIDs that ; don't have.

--Andy

 

[giantbucket]

sounds good. i'll lean towards a few large HDD, and just pick them up when sales are happening. I've got free HDD space on my current 1.5T drives to keep me going for another month or two (three tops).

and yeah, I'm avoiding RAID. I once dabbled with JBOD and that caused me grief and a lot of lost data, so I'm just going to stick with separate discrete drives.

thanks!!!