I need some help picking out some hard-drives for a storage box that I'm planning to build. I may end up using it like NAS, simply using it to stream movies through my router to my main PC to watch. I'm going to be using a Define R3 case, ergo, not really interested in SFF per-say. I estimate that by 2014 I'll need around 6TB of storage and I will have 8 HDD bays on the R3. Can anyone suggest some hard-drives I should be using? I'm still not sure whether I should use 2TB or 3TB drives vs all 1TB drives, for instance in case of HDD failure obviously 1TB is better than 3TB. Also, like I asked earlier, would streaming 1080p through the router be possible? I don't even know what I'm going to be running on this yet and I'm utterly new to NAS as a concept, so any help would be great.
Personally I am a fan of WD drives, and stick to 2Tb ones. Other prefer different drives and sizes. And yes you can stream 1080p through the router, I do multiple streams at a time without issue. Also consider a backup strategy, not RAID. I have a full mirrored backup onto external hard drives.
Ok so If I want to get a 2TB drive, are there any drives out there faster, more reliable and quieter than the spinpoint F3? This is really my only point of reference, If there's a drive out there that can do all that then I'll get it I really do want a more or less inaudible drive though, I'll be willing to pay a bit of a price premium for it. I've tried to look myself but there are just SO many drives It's driving me crazy. I looked at WD and they're currently hugely price-hiked from ebuyer so will probably have to get an alternative.
F3s are the go to drives, I run two of them myself in a NAS with all HDDs you're going to get a bit of noise when in use but slower RPM drives will be quieter and use less power. You won't hear any HDD over case fans, that's if you're having fans in there which I'd recommend.
