Sourced from real discussions on r/homelab and r/DataHoarder, cross-checked against live PricePerGig listings.

Having fewer, larger drives is the direction to travel when you have, or want, a tens-to-hundreds-of-terabytes setup. The main issue is that your setup can only handle so many connected drives, and even if it could handle unlimited, your electricity bill will thank you for fewer drives, since a 30TB drive uses about the same power as a 1TB drive!

So I will give you the answer up front, because you are busy.

Buy the big drives. Almost every time.

The maths is not even close

Look at the live table above. It’s sorted by price per TB column.

The little drives are always near the bottom of the value pile. The chunky 16TB, 18TB and 20TB units are where your money actually turns into storage.

A closet full of old 250GB drives is a museum, not a backup strategy. You’ll probably want 500GB or 1TB for your backups.

You pay for a motor, a controller and a casing on every single drive. Buy forty tiny ones and you have bought forty motors. Buy four big ones and you have bought four.

Power, noise and the spin-up surge nobody mentions

Every spinning drive sips power and hums all day, every day.

Forty drives is a small heater and a constant drone in your office. Six drives is a whisper. The noise of many drives is the thing people only notice once the rack is humming next to their desk.

There is a sharper, less obvious cost too: the initial spin-up surge. Each drive pulls a big slug of power the instant it spins up, far more than it draws once running. Spin a wall of drives up at once and a modest power supply can sag or trip. Fewer, bigger drives sidestep that entirely.

Over a few years the running-cost difference alone can pay for a chunk of the bigger drives. So the dense build is not just cheaper to buy, it is cheaper and calmer to run.

”But a big drive failing loses more data”

This is the one good point in the small drive argument, and it deserves respect.

Yes, a 22TB drive dying takes more with it than a 500GB drive dying.

But here is the thing.

The answer to “what if a drive dies” is never “buy smaller drives”. The answer is redundancy. Parity, mirrors, an offsite copy. You spread the risk with parity, not with a wall of weedy little disks that each have their own chance of failing — more drives just means more things that can break, more heat, more noise and more power draw.

This is exactly what Unraid and ZFS are built for. Put your big drives behind RAIDZ2 or a double mirror and two drives can die while your data sits there unbothered.

RAID is not a backup - and that is where the small drives come back

Worth saying plainly: RAID is not a backup. It keeps you running when a drive dies, but it will happily replicate a fat-fingered delete or a ransomware encrypt across every disk in the array.

This is the one job your old, smaller drives are still perfect for. Don’t bin them — repurpose them as cold backups. They are ideal for saving the irreplaceable stuff, family photos, your side project copy, probably not your movie library, then leaving the drive at a friend’s or relative’s house for proper offsite safety. Worried they might have a nosy look? Encrypt the drive first and the contents are only going to be bread by you and nobody else, they just sit waiting unreadable at their house.

What I would actually buy

Here is my opinionated, money conscious take.

• Pick the capacity that sits lowest on the price per TB table thats within your budget for your marketplace.
• Buy three to six of them, not twenty.
• Put them behind RAIDZ2 or a double mirror so two drives can die and you still sleep, or the budget friendly option of unRAID.
• Keep one cold copy somewhere else, on those older small drives, because RAID is not a backup.

That gets you a quiet, cheap, dense pile of storage with room to grow.

The bottom line

For a 20 to 80TB home lab, go big and go few.

A handful of large drives, proper redundancy on top, one encrypted offsite copy. That is the boring, correct answer, and the live prices above will tell you exactly which capacity is the deal today on your marketplace.

Now go and switch the marketplace selector to your country so those numbers are actually yours.

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