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[CountryBumkin]

I'm planning to upgrade my small 4 drive RAID5 setup (it's four 1TB drives) to a something like four 4TB drives in RAID6. I'm wondering if I should buy Enterprise dives again (I currently use all 1TB Seagate ES.2 enterprise drives now (in my 4TB and 8TB RAID arrays).

Would drives designed for "AV" be a better choice (these AV drives say they are designed for video recording on a security system - which is not what I do)? My HTPC Server system runs 24/7 (but the drive activity is only high when recording OTA and movie/music playback which is probably only 20% of the "on time".

Also where there be any issues I need to consider if I go with 4TB drives. I believe I read here that some people had issues with reading off the 4TB drives (might have been due to OS limitations or the NAS. I don't recall the specifics). I'm running Win7 on the Server and I have Win8.1 available if advisable.

Thanks for you advise.

[Hendrik]

There is plenty of subjective feelings in harddrive choices. Personally I wouldn't invest in actual enterprise drives, since they are easily twice the price.
I just go with "NAS" drives theses days, mostly WD Red, some Seagate NAS drives.

[CountryBumkin]

Thanks for the advice.

[mwillems]

Thanks for the advise.

+1 on the WD reds.  I'm very happy with mine.  I've only had them about 8 months so I can't speak to long-term reliability, but they're cool-running and quiet.

[kensn]

I have been very pleased with my WD Red drives also.

[6233638]

My music library lives on "enterprise" hard drives. (WD Re)
 
My video library lives on any drive which is a reasonable price for its capacity, with a 5 year warranty.
Previously that was the Hitachi 7K4000 drives, recently I have been buying WD Se drives (which are technically enterprise ones) because the price difference at the time was minimal.
 
I'd avoid green/low energy drives. In my experience these seem to be more prone to failure than anything else. (WD Green especially, but any "low energy" drive really)
 
 
Music is backed up to something like five other drives in total. Two which are connected to the PC at all times, and staggered/rotated backups to others. Yes, I'm very paranoid about that. I do not ever want to be re-ripping thousands of CDs.
 
DVDs are backed up to a second disk too. As with CDs, 4TB of DVDs is a lot of discs to re-rip when the average size is about 4GB.
 
Blu-rays are not currently backed up to anything, the disc is my "backup".
I'd like to back them up, but it would be prohibitively expensive to double my storage for that right now, and at about 30GB on average, there are not so many discs that I can't just re-rip them if I lost a drive.
Running HDsentinel has given me advance warning of impending drive failures, and so far I haven't lost any data as a result.

[CountryBumkin]

Over at Newegg, the WD Red (WD40EFRX) 4TB and the Seagate NAS (ST4000VN000) 4TB drives are the same price at $169. The WD "RE" is $254. Western Digital also has a "Red Pro" for $245.
Is there enough difference in build quality to warrant the extra $75 or 85 going for a RE or Pro?
I didn't compare warranties.

[6233638]

Over at Newegg, the WD Red (WD40EFRX) 4TB and the Seagate NAS (ST4000VN000) 4TB drives are the same price at $169. The WD "RE" is $254. Western Digital also has a "Red Pro" for $245.
Is there enough difference in build quality to warrant the extra $75 or 85 going for a RE or Pro?
I didn't compare warranties.

Well you get an extra two years warranty with the Re or Se drives. Of course that doesn't guarantee that the drives will actually last any longer, just that you'll get a replacement if it dies. (though they are supposed to be more reliable)
As I said, when I bought them, the Se drives were very close in price to the Hitachi drives I had been buying. The Re drives are always going to cost a lot more than anything else.
 
Whether that's worth it to you depends on how many drives you need, and whether you want that extra peace of mind.

[astromo]

As part of the process, I'd suggest that you check your RAID capacity plan.

There are various RAID calculators to assist with the maths. Here's one:
http://www.raid-calculator.com/default.aspx

There's all sorts of for and against that you can get into around RAID 5 / RAID 6 or whatever else. This is where Wikipedia does a good job of providing an overview that most people can agree with:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
I've included this reference to back me up:
http://blog.open-e.com/how-does-raid-5-work/
This other thread from the same general source works at my level of simplicity:
blog.open-e.com/raid-5-raid-6-or-other-alternativee/


The other issue is drive size and the risks that it poses:
http://www.businesscomputingworld.co.uk/4tb-hard-drives-bring-raid-6-to-its-limits/

I found the whole thing all rather confusing and I've been left with a whole lot of, "well, it depends".

I ended up punting for RAID 5 with a 5 x 3TB set up. The test will be when I get a drive failure.. 

[CountryBumkin]

Thanks for the advise and links.
Here's some background on my situation and solution - if your interested.

1) I currently have two 3Ware hardware RAID controllers, an 8-drive 3Ware 9650SE and a 4-drive 3Ware 9650SE in my Server machine. Both arrays are built with 1TB drives in a RAID5 config.

2) The 8 drive array is for my movies (BD and DVD) and it is close to being full (I have about 6TB on it now).

3) the 4 drive array is for music, pictures, and TV shows/series. (I have about 2TB on it)

I want to expand the 8 drive array, but I don't have a place to copy the movies to (and I don't want to re-rip all my movies). So the idea was presented to expand the smaller 4 drive array first, then move my movies to that new RAID, and then I can expand the 8 drive array later.

I just bought four 3TB drives (Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 series). I was planning to do RAID6 but I found out that I can't do RAID 6 with my 4 drive controller (it requires 5 drives minimum for RAID 6) so I will do the four 3TB drives in a RAID5. This will give me around 9TB of drive space.

Then I will copy the entire contents of the 8-drive array to the new 9TB 4-drive array. First, I will move as much of the stuff from the 4 drive array over to the 8 drive (like my music and TV shows). I might lose a few shows depending on exactly how much space I have remaining on the 8-drive.

When I'm done copying, I will have all my movies moved over the new 4 drive array and all my music/TV on the old 8-drive array. Then I can move the music and TV shows back to the new 9TB array and I will have an empty 8 drive array - which I can then upgrade using eight  3TB or 4TB drives in a RAID6.

That's a lot of moving files around - but this will be the last time I ever expand the arrays. I'll end up with a 9TB array and a second array of 18TB or 24TB (depending on drives used). That should last the rest of my life.

And thanks for the link to the "raid-calculator" too.

[Sparks67]

I use an Areca Raid Controller ARC-1882-ix-16, but Areca tests out different Hard drives to work with their controller.  I am currently using Western Digital Enterprise drives WD4000F9YZ
and Seagate Enterprise drives ST32000645NS.   I have tried to use NAS drives in the past, but they are not reliable.   Desktop drives now last around 6 months,
but I lost 3 TB of music in a drive failure.  I will never use another desktop drive again.   Hitachi drives only last around 2 years.