When do you think will there be a price drop again for HDD?
I wanted to change sooner or later all my HDDs in my NAS (6x2TB), and I wanted to put 6x4TB. But at the moment the price for a 4TB HDD is still around 200€.
Annoying thing is also that after the swap, you will end up with 6 spare 2TB HDDs, which you cannot really use anymore.
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You could easily sell on the old 2TB drives on Amibay. Members will buy them easily for a reasonable price. I would say at least half their original price is easily possible, so you would get some money back towards the new drives.
I was actually going to post something about drives falling in price, but SSDs. I just noticed that larger SSDs are finally starting to fall to affordable prices. I've avoided using an SSD for a boot drive so far because they are not big enough for my needs. However you can now get a Crucial M4 SSD, with SATA-III, 500MB/s read and 260MB/s write, for £264. Only a couple of months ago drives this size were over £500. This is still more than I would pay, but it shows they are falling. I'm hoping by the autumn the SSD prices will have really dropped to avoidable levels.
As for larger mechanical drives, they have come down quite a bit since they shot up in price. You can now get 2TB drives for £65, which is coming back down to the £50 I was paying before the disaster that shot the prices up. And £65 is still much lower than 6 even months ago, then they were around £90-£100, and a year ago were closer to £160-200. The cheapest 4TB drives I've seen are still about £150 though for the Seagate Barracuda, and I'm sure they will drop more by the summer.
I definitely think you should wait a few months more to see if they will fall in price further. 3TB drives f.ex. are now under £100. I just saw a Seagate 3TB one for £89.99, which works out cheaper per GB than a 2TB drive.
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Anyway, I will wait a bit, I still have 1.5TB free on my NAS at the moment.
I wouldn't buy 3TB disks, as probably I would have to change them again 1-2 years later, ending up again with 6 spare drives. I will wait a bit, and go straight with 4TB disks.
Actually I'm also running the NAS in Raid5 mode, but I was planning if I would have 6x4TB disks, I would probably use Raid6, to be even a bit more on the safer side, although you never know what can happen. But I already once had cold shivers after the lightning struck and the NAS didn't boot up at all and was stuck!!
Wouldn't it be wiser to buy a second NAS with exactly the same config and just mirror the 2, just to be on the safest side possible? Would be the most expensive solution, but I guess the safest?
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