6TB Hard Drives might be the new normal for the D800

I use 6 x 2TB RAID 6 (8TB effective) as my primary storage. And it's already half full after spending 8 months with my D800E and the prior 4 years with a D700 with various video cams. The additional speed does make editing TIFFs far less painful.

Not really a RAID expert, but I read that Given that higher capacity drives are more likely to run into unrecoverable error given the 1/1E15 error rate, it is recommended you really don't use drives bigger than 1TB (2TB is already a stretch), or otherwise a rebuild would take too long before other drives fail. Sounds reasonable precaution to me.

So with a mainstream 8 port RAID controller(9265-8i or 6805 comes to mind) running RAID 6, you really have maximum 6TB (8x1T) or 12TB (8x2T) of storage max. For those shoot quite a bit of video and 36MP 14-bit RAWs after using the D800/E for 2-3 years , they might need to shop for a RAID controller with 12 or 16 ports.

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D800E
Nikon Zooms: 16-35/4, 24-70/2.8, 70-200 VR2, TC-20E3, 28-300VR.
Nikon Primes: 24/1.4G, 50/1.8G, 85/1.8G.