Not a data hoarder yet. But I am increasingly use plex more and not backing up enough so I need to do more backups I think.
I have a NAs with just 3TB drives. They're half full which give sme anxiety. I want to future proof. I use truenas and have 4 drive slots in my NAS. Was thinking of getting 4 of the biggest drives I can get my hands on and populating it and leave it at that - it seems that drive prices have heat their floor limit and aren't going down i nprice so might as well just buy the biggest drives I can get hold of right?
Case in point I bought seagate barrracuda 3T for £70 from amazon in 2018. the exact same model today sold on amazon is £100. But why on earth would anyone buy a 3TB now for that price a 16TB ironwolf pro is £230
Got me thinking what is the goldilocks range for price and performance. I am finding that price per TB is the lowest on 16TB drives and then it seems to increase overall per TB when you go higher. Really 16TB is like £20 more expensive than 12TB sometimes. But 20TB can be +£100 more than 16TB.
Is there a reliability tradeoff if you buy a hard drive thats 20TB, 26Tb even 30TB? data must be written so fine that surely there is likely to be reliability trade offs?
I heard all this talk of drive failures.. honestly after some 25 years of home computing I have never ever experience hard drive failute (Or SSD failure). More often than not ta hard drive will make all sorts of groaning noises and become a bit slow and I would take that time to upgrade the drive - ususally is obselete by then too.