upgrade paths for a cs407 owner

[wayland]

i have a cs407 with 4x1TB WD10EACS but i only have abot 440GB of space left which isnt very much as i started with 2.6TB.

i need to upgrade but cant decide on the best option, WD 1.5TB drives are reasonably priced but dont offer a significant increase in space, the 2TB drives are still very expensive but they are compatible and would give a decent increase in capacity.

cost more but leaving the 407 as is and getting a newer nas like the dx5 or maybe going diy seems a good option, that would also give the largest increase in drive space.

i till have enough free space on my nas and pc to last a while so this isnt something i have to do right away but its easier if i can decide on what i will do so i have an idea of the cost

[thiggins]

The first thing I would do is to hunt down and remove duplicate files and then compress infrequently-used files. In business / enterprise storage, data de-duplication is a very hot topic right now because it's too damned expensive to just keep throwing more drives at the problem.

Consumer NAS manufacturers have yet to address this and I don't expect they will for awhile, since it runs counter to their desire to sell more NASes. But you can get a start on it by using one of the many duplicate file finder programs available to search your NAS' shares.

[wayland]

there are probably a few duplicate files but i dont think there is a significant number, as for compression i dont think that would work due to the contents of my nas (mostly video files, some audio), i should go through the files and any i dont want either delete or move to a usb harddrivebut i do that every 6 months or so so i dont think i would recover much space (100gig maybe)