starter system with room for expansion. 6x HD questions

[jtonthebike]

Hi all,

Thanks for the quantity of reading i've enjoyed thus far.

I'm currently a mature student (so cash is tight) but have started acquiring some suitable equipment for the basis of a home NAS. My intentions are to have storage for my media library, family photo's and perhaps later down the line, storage for some VM's.

I'll be using a Supermicro 846 chassis (24 bay) an X9 board (the model # escapes me at this hour) 16Gb ram and an E3-1230v2 cpu. I understand this to be suitable hardware - if not the latest. I'd planned on buying 6x disks initially.

As cash is tight, I have found some Western Digital 4Tb disks on offer but with 6months warranty and i'm tempted because of their price and the fact I have an older WD 2Tb disk since they were released, working quite happily in another machine. My questions are:

• Would 're-certified' drives raise eyebrows or do you think they'll be OK in this instance? My intentions would be to use RAID-Z3 as i'd rather have a reliable system than super-fast.
• Or, in terms of 'bang for buck' would new smaller disks (say 2Tb) be more appropriate? I could allocate approx £450 and currently have ~5Tb to migrate over.
• I'm unsure as to whether 2 vdev's(? if that's the correct term) would offer more reliability) compared to 1x.

Huge thanks in advance.

 

[Fraoch]

're-certified' drives

reliable

These just don't go together. They're not worth the risk, especially with a 6 month warranty and especially since you want so much protection for your data you want to go RAID-Z3.

Or, in terms of 'bang for buck' would new smaller disks (say 2Tb) be more appropriate?

Provided they come with a full warranty, anything would be preferable. Cost per delivered TB favours 4 TB drives at the moment, but you can upgrade later by swapping out the drives one by one and resilvering - though you will drop down to RAID-Z2 while the resilver is in progress. That should be acceptable on a temporary basis.