I have $300 to spend on 5 HDDs, what's the most storage I can get right now?

I'm not storing anything important, so I can do used/refurbished drives and deal with a failed drive, but I'd rather not get scammed. I don't care about brand, I can deal with SAS or SATA. I'm hoping for drives that are 6TB and up to go in a cheap mini-NAS I threw together.

It seems like most stories from lurking on this sub are to stay away from the deals on ebay. Unfortunately that seems to be the only place where you can get a decent drive for ~$50-60 per, because the reputable places only deal with bigger 12-20 TB refurb drives for >$100 each. I'm not spending $1000 to store my cartoons, I'm also unwilling to delete anything I downloaded with my overpriced internet.

Is this a pipe dream and I should just increase my budget? Is it worthwhile to wait and hunt and hope the market becomes more favorable to my dilemma?

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It is extremely unlikely for the market to return to the sweet spot (price/TB) being at $50-$60 drives as it was before the "hard drive crisis that started at the end of 2011".

Beside being not that good at TB/$ the small drives will cost more over time in power, and taking more bays and crippling your upgrade possibilities, the chances to sell them for something when you need to upgrade and so on. Oh, plus nowadays you'll need to pay a premium to get out of the SMR doghouse, while with the large drives it just comes with the size.

In short just take one very large drive and wait for more money or increase (not much) the budget and get a similar one too. Or two of the medium-large-size. I'm sure you want 5 for redundancy, but this way you can do real backups (or even if you do RAID1 it'll be WAY safer than RAID5). No matter if you're losing "only" 20% with RAID5 versus 50% with RAID1 (or backups, much more recommended) it's probably more likely you can do 2x16TB in $300 than 5x4TBs (let's say either for 16TB usable). And better all around.
- Thanks for your response and that's kind of what I was fearing.
  
  With that said...yeah I do have a RAID 5 array and that's really the main reason why I want 5x$60 drives, just drop in replacement and copy back the data. I understand RAID 1 would be safer, but it won't be as fast and sacrifice too much drive in the name of redundancy. I enjoy the balance of read speed, redundancy, and array size of RAID 5 and it's been working well for my purposes.
  
  Just do raidz1 across 3 drives. 10tb drives are probably what you want in that case. That said I'm just upgrading to a single 20tb instead of another array, you might consider doing the same and expanding later
- ahem RAID is not backup

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