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.
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.