On 11/29/2014 09:06 AM, Jeremy MountainJohnson wrote: > Based on a lot of recent tests, I'll probably go with Western Digital > drives for the cost savings and longevity, unless anyone has other > suggestions? > Based on the pile of dead drives laying on my desk right now (and the links below), avoid Seagate like the plague. Unless you really like swapping disks all the time. I tried out a WD "Green" drive for an application where performance didn't matter as well (offline storage in a fire safe, with monthly updates), because it was cheap - and it was junk too. It literally worked 3 times, before failed entirely. Higher end WD is probably better - but lately, I've been spending the extra $ for Hitachi / HGST drives for systems where I don't want to deal with drive failures: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/ WD now owns the Hitachi drive line, but they don't seem to have ruined it yet. As far as disk size... 2 or 3 TB isn't that much higher than 1 TB these days.... especially if you go with the cheapest drives, and just deal with the inevitable failures. Depending on how the numbers shake out, however, you might come out ahead just running 3 6TB drives in a mirror config, rather than 5 smaller drives in a different RAID config to get your 2 drive fail-safety. Another nice aspect of a simple mirror setup, is you can pull a drive and read it, without needing the RAID config. Dan