What would you do?

Greenlizard0

Greenlizard0

Greenlizard0

Man of Honour
Joined
15 Mar 2004
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Liverpool
Currently I have a 1.5TB hard drive for my storage needs which has run out of space. I have 2, 1 sitting in my rig, and the other in a self assembled caddy outside which acts as a back up.

By upgrading there'd be 2 scenarios :

A) 2 new identical 2TB drives setup in the same way, sell my existing 1.5TB drives.
B) 2 new identical 1TB drives which sit alongside the 1.5TB drives.

A)I'd sell the pair of 1.5TB drives I have at the moment, and with them having around 2.5 years of warranty left, I should be able to get a price for them such the whole upgrade costs around £120.

The advantages of that are I have two less hard drives running and I'd not need to buy another external caddy for the additional back up drive.

The disadvantage of that of course is that yet more data is put onto one drive, though of course it is backed up.

B)Upgrading such that I purchase a pair of 1TB drives would also, looking around at prices, cost £120. So the same price.

The advantage of that is now my data is put across more drives making the loss of one slightly less dramatic. Also, I'd be getting an extra 500GB or so ugrading like this for the same amount of money spent on drives.

The disadvantage is that now I'd be running 4 drives, and I'd have to spend a little more on purchasing a caddy.

What would you guys do? Do you have any thoughts?

Cheers in advance.
 
I go through this debate every so often as I start to run out of storage and backup space. There's probably no clear right answer, but there are a couple of thoughts that might help the decision:
- How long will it be before you reach 2TB or 2.5TB - it might make one approach look better/cheaper in the longer run.
- This might not be an issue for you if you intend to sell disks on, but in a few years' time 1/1.5TB disks might start looking a bit small, so 2TB drives might be better in the long run (i.e. less hassle trying to 'fill up' smaller disks and avoiding running out of sata ports or needing yet more external caddies).
- Is one backup enough? Maybe keep one smaller disk for really critical/irreplaceable data that you backup to less frequently, and keep it off-site.
- Re one large disk vs. spreading files across two smaller disks, if you assume all the disks are as reliable as each other then the chance of losing an individual file should be the same. (Providing you're not spanning 2 disks to make one large volume in which case either disk failing can lose all data). With 2 smaller disks you're more likely to lose some data (double the total failure rate) and with 1 large disk you're more likely to lose all your data. Horses for courses, really...
 
Don't forget option C)

Delete things that you will never use again, but are storing anyway (I do a lot of hoarding :) )
 
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