Advice on best storage for 2.5" Dell R720

[lavta3]

Hey guys,
I recently picked up a Dell Poweredge r720 8x2.5" drives for $50 with the following specs:
64gb ecc DDR3 ram
Dual E5-2640 @ 2.5ghz (6 cores/12 threads on each cpu) 12 core/24 threads all together
8x 10k 300GB Drives
2x 750 Watt PSU
PERC H710 (but I'll be replacing this shortly)

For the price paid, I feel like it was an easy entry point to play around and get familiar with truenas, especially since it had 8 drives included.

My biggest question is about whats the best option for the 2.5" drives?
Is my best option to go with SSD's?
My use case is just storing my pictures/videos and will most likely set up a plex server.
I currently have around 4tb of movies for Plex and about 1.5tb of personal files.

 

[NugentS]

SSD = Expensive
You can get 5TB 2.5" HDD but it might be SMR which you want to avoid
You already know about HBA's and IT Mode

You have 5.5 TB of data - so should start with a minumum of 11 TB useable storage (preferably more for space as you expand)

8 * 2TB, RAIDZ2 = 12TB RAW. I suspect that 2TB will about the limit of size on a 2.5" HDD - but I am sure someone will correct me

Depends on budget and what disks you can find that aren't SMR
All Seagate seem to be SMR
WD do a 2TB Blue or 1TB Black