I think I would go for refurbished/used 12tb drives or bigger if money allows. I put 3x12tb in my server 2 years ago and thought I would have more than enough space for a long time...I did not.
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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Some things to think about.
Even ZFS now let's you add a new drive to an array, and the sweet spot for $/TB is ~16-20TB at the moment, so maybe think about 2 or 3x16TB and add more later (also less power).
Consider manufacturer recertified (not refurbished) server drives from serverpartdeals.com or your local equivalent, after all RAID is there to let you survive a disk failure, it's treated me well, and lets you avoid SMR drives.
You can mix drives of different sizes if you use Unraid or roll your own with mergerfs+snapraid (+OpenMediaVault perhaps). I do the latter, it's a bit of a setup, but has the advantage that drives are just drives and you can use the working ones while rebuilding the array and you can recover accidental deletions (for a while), which brings me to 'RAID is not a backup'.
For true data safety you should have an offline backup (i.e. drives that live disconnected from your computer except during backup, safe from lightning, accidental deletion etc.) and eventually an offsite copy.
Personally I think the AI bought all our drives from WD is likely BS (seems lightly supported) to goose their product prices, so hopefully it'll blow over, but prices seldom go down, inflation catches up. Sigh.
I moved from my old nas to my new in a similar manner.
I have a two disk mirror. Call the disks d1 and d2.
- removed d1 from the old server, put it in the new nas
- creat fresh filesystem on d1
- copied the data, over the network, from d2 to d1.
- took d2 from the old server and added it to a mirror with d1 in the new server. Let it resilver.
It worked, but I was damn sure to have a backup.
Also note, the ugreen nas software is garbage. Install your own os.
For backup i use restic to backblaze.
Coming from Synology it was a little too walled garden for me and I also hated their software, but that was also my first forray into nas. Good place to get my feet wet and all. I'm not really well versed in nas os's though, any recommendations?
People like FreeNAS.
I just installed alpine Linux. I just wanted a compact Linux with good ZFS support.