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.
and unwilling to re-download
Re-downloading would also hurt my wallet. I want to keep what I have and have the ability to download more, but not for more than $300 or $400. Is that possible in your opinion? I know I'll never get a new drive that has any sort of density I'm looking for at that price. So I'm willing to use refurb drives and deal with the possibility of failure as long as those risks are within reason. I guess that means a place with some kind of buyer protection or return policy that's better than begging and pleading with ebay as the arbiter.
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?