If I understand correctly, The most storage you will ever get is less than 60T and that is with 5x12T drives. Not worth it at the current price.

​

Also, I am confused why you would want a Raid enclosure (your 5N) to function as an unprotected external hard drive. You only have 19.97T available as you are protected across your 5 drives from a single drive failure. If you could, switch to an unprotected setup and have the raw capacity of 25.46T available, you would lose everything if a single drive failure. Why would you want this?

​

I prefer the Dual Disk Redundancy (allowing for 2 drive failures), which in your case would reduce you to 14.52T available. But it gives me time to order a drive with Amazon Prime and replace the bad/full drive in case a second drive goes as well, and only if a 3rd drive where to fail would I lose any data.

​

In my opinion, you have a few options.

1. Buy normal External Drives, with no cloned safety (aka Non-RAID) and move your content to them. You could get a few $140 each ($17.50 per Tb) Seagate Expansion 8TB Desktop External Hard Drive USB 3.0 and plug them into your Router.
2. Buy bigger drives for your 5N. Seagate 8TB IronWolf $240 each, you will need 2 to gain any storage.
3. Delete data you don't need.
4. Buy Cloud Storage (Google, DropBox, Amazon...) and store data you don't need at the moment.

Good luck.

I'm from the UK so I aim to spend up to £20 per TB, I've managed to get 8TB HDDs for £175 so what you have there seems slightly over priced. The only reason you'd need a faster read write speed is for plotting which you hopefully will only do once so I don't think it's worth paying extra for. As long as your DLs get submitted within 4 minutes you're all good. Same reasoning for usb 3. Not necessary but could aid faster plotting.

Edit: I found this for you; https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HAPGEIE

Primary concern - Block latency propagation and bandwidth

X-thin/Compact blocks

Secondary concern - CPU and Ram

bitcrust

Least concern - Hard drive space

Metcalfe's law... 8TB for less than $200 will be good at full 8Mb blocks for 3 years.

Also... you know about all this... so you are not being objective!

I'm using one of these Seagate drives. Works great and is a great price, too.

I bought this seagate one.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HAPGEIE/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_Fv3NAbAVQTTZW

Seems to work well thus far.

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01HAPGEIE/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

This one seems like a good deal to me.

This one. I posted it in the Black Friday deals thread in the sub as well.

Edit : It was $189.99 before black friday sale, but after the sale it has only gone up to $150, so it doesn't sound as much of a discount now.