Adding Drives to RAID 6

[zeroibis]

I have a 6 drive RAID 6 array that is down to its last TB. It is time to order up a new drive but I got a problem. All 6 of my drives are: Hitachi GST Deskstar 7K2000 HDS722020ALA330 (0F10311) 2TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache.

I have found some places selling the HGST Deskstar 7K3000 HDS723020BLA642 cheep but I wonder if I should buy that or spend more on a Western Digital WD Black WD2002FAEX 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache.

The other issue is that I can only get the Deskstar off some random sites I have never shopped at before while I can get the WD drive off newegg. I have had great experience having DOA drives replaced by newegg but it is $50-60 more for the WD drive and I am very short on money right now and can barely afford a drive as it is.

So what are the recommendations and what sort of issues will I face using a drive different than the ones currently in the array?

[bot@xs]

it's a good idea to use the same drives or similar or like drives for consistency; however, on the other hand that is exactly the reason why you want to avoid this. it increases the chance more then one drive failing in very short time periods.
don't be afraid to change up, as long as the specs, especially when it comes to performance are in the same ballpark, you should be fine. the WD black is a better drive

[zeroibis]

I will state that the drives were all purchased at different times so that most of them would be from different batches. 2 of the drives were purchased a year after the first 4.

[Zaxx]

For raid duty I recommend the WD Blacks and WD REs (raid edition). Sure you pay a little more but the WDs are generally faster and have a full 5 year warranty...most others are 2 or 3 years. I'm running 4 atm and have 2 more WDs for archives via dual eSata dock. Never an issue with WDs except for when I bought a 500GB Blue Caviar (2yr warranty)...it started bricking sectors after about 6 months of use.

[zeroibis]

I still got an original 75GB Deskstar that continues to work after 11 years lol. Ironically the only drives that ever failed on me was:
A 75GB deskstar within 6 months
A WD Rapter (first gen) -died at some point in a raid 5 array never noticed it was broken until a year after the system was being scrapped for parts
A 120GB Vertex2 within 6 months
A 125ishGB 15k Cheeta SAS within 3 years [was in raid 0 ]

Considering how many HDDs I have had over the last 10 years it seems most of them last for a long time.
Oh the HDD in my DRV broke after god knows how many years (was a first gen HD DVR from comcast) -not sure if that counts for much lol


Yes though for future arrays when I got more money I plan to only use server drives b/c that build will finally be for a dedicated home server rather than just stacking all this in my main rig.

[tived]

Have you thought about WD RED drives?

I use 8x 3tb in a Synology 1812+ and i am very happy with them so far :-)

Henrik

[zeroibis]

Files I use on my RAID are massive I get the fastest high capacity drives I have money for when making arrays. This is why I do not even look at anything below 7200rpm. Maybe the future helium drives will allow for some good prices on high capacity 10k-15k drives.