BUILD Cheap and Easy (New Dad) Build

[flyinfitz1]

Happy New Year! Thanks everyone for your help.

Just waiting for my TS140, RAM, USB drives, and router to arrive. In the meantime, I am looking for nice, cheap storage options.

I have an alert created on SlickDeals for WD Red 3TB drives but was wondering if anyone had other recommendations. Also still debating between RAIDZ1 and RAIDZ2. I only want a max of 4 HDD right now so doing RAIDZ2 with 4 drives will yield less than half in usable storage space due to formatting and parity drives.

Its a big jump in price from 3TB to 4TB/6TB drives. so if you're on a budget that may not be an option I think my setup shows 4.6TB of usable space with 4x3TB RAIDZ2. That being said redundancy was my main concern.

 

[bmcclure937]

Just byte the bullet now and buy 4TB or even 6TB drives.

Sure they cost a bit more, but in the grand scheme of things, what will you do, when you outgrow the 3TB drives?

This sounds great, in theory, but funds are limited. I do not know if I would even use all of the usable storage provided by 4x3TB in a RAIDZ2 configuration.

If I only plan to run 4 HDDs I am still struggling with the problem of RAIDZ1... which would have 1 parity drive and 3 data drives.

 

[bmcclure937]

Its a big jump in price from 3TB to 4TB/6TB drives. so if you're on a budget that may not be an option I think my setup shows 4.6TB of usable space with 4x3TB RAIDZ2. That being said redundancy was my main concern.

Yeah - at that point I feel like buying 2x 5TB WD Red drive and just mirroring them would be just as good for my needs as having a 4x3TB RAIDZ2... I would end up with a mirror for some redundancy but also have a good amount of usable storage.

I am trying to wrap my mind around my various options and plan this out before pulling the trigger.

 

[gpsguy]

Whatever you do, ensure that you have good backups. We'd hate to hear that you had a disk problem and lost those precious baby pictures.