Help me choose best RAID setup

[Guldan]

I am about to create a new storage setup as I inherited some hardware as shown below:

Dell 1950 w/ SAS HBA connected to an MD1000 w/ 13x 750gb ES + 2x 1000gb ES drives. I'm thinking of doing raidz2 in freenas so i'd have 9TB storage w/ 2 drives for redundancy. (Maybe 1 hot spare as well)

BUT my storage array would be full, it would use a lot of power and 9TB isn't future proofing my array size wise.

The thing is the 15 drives albiet not that large are enterprise drives, my intention would be to replace them with 2TB drives, perhaps 7-8 of them costing me $700-800 and that's for regular drives.. pretty damn pricey!

I only currently use 2.5 TB of data (mostly media) so I'm leaning towards using my current drives to save money and time.

Thoughts?

 

[ashman]

Whats your backup strategy for all this data?

I'd start buying 2TB or 3TB a few at a time as I can afford them until you have enough to create a volume the size you want that is also future proof.

 

[Guldan]

Whats your backup strategy for all this data?

I'd start buying 2TB or 3TB a few at a time as I can afford them until you have enough to create a volume the size you want that is also future proof.

I can afford it now, if I want to. But doesn't seem worth the cost currently.

For backup I have a few 2TB green drives, I'll probably backup data to a few individual drives nightly. Like I said I only have 2.5 TB of data right now.

I don't think the MD1000 can support 3TB drives either