Adding 6 more TB of SSD space to my Rig

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That should cement my system to never go back to Spinners again.... I don't trust that other stuff out there but I'm trusting that Crucial will be ok. So I'll have a total of 15.5 TB of SSD space =) I have a 4 TB Crucial 3.5" and a 2 TB Samsung M.2 in the mail. I go into Panic Mode when my drives are 1/3 from being full I mean who wouldn't you don't want to start uninstalling games just to make space. I don't have a faster Internet so this is part of the problem I have with my game files.

This is the 1st Crucial drive I ever bought I went Samsung for everything else over the past 10 years ever since I bought my first one for Planetside 2 in 2011 a 256 Gig SSD.
I do own one Western Digital Blue 3.5" drive but it's only a 1TB drive and the housing on it is plastic picked it up at work like 4 years ago when I have had more sata ports on my Tachi MB.
 
RecentlyAdded said:
I'm goimg to strip together five 2.5 hhd to see if it gets close to ssd performance ad back it up on a single big HHD
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That sounds silly.

You might get decent throughput between ~750-1000 MB/s (assuming HDD rates of ~150-200 MB/s * 5). A bit better than a SATA SSD, but nowhere near an NVMe unit. But the real downside will be access time/latency, which will still be stuck at HDD speeds orders of magnitude slower than any SSD (SATA or NVMe). It's access time/latency, not throughput, that makes SSDs so much better than HDDs for most things. Also, you can multiply your chances of a volume failure by the number of drives used to create it.

Generally, striped volumes (i.e., RAID 0) really should only ever be used for transient data in situations where a single drive isn't big enough to hold it all.
 
BlueLineSwinger said:
That sounds silly.

You might get decent throughput between ~750-1000 MB/s (assuming HDD rates of ~150-200 MB/s * 5). A bit better than a SATA SSD, but nowhere near an NVMe unit. But the real downside will be access time/latency, which will still be stuck at HDD speeds orders of magnitude slower than any SSD (SATA or NVMe). It's access time/latency, not throughput, that makes SSDs so much better than HDDs for most things. Also, you can multiply your chances of a volume failure by the number of drives used to create it.

Generally, striped volumes (i.e., RAID 0) really should only ever be used for transient data in situations where a single drive isn't big enough to hold it all.
Click to expand...

I know failure rate will be a factor, but its going to be a steam drive and VMs..all backed up
I have a stack of 2.5" laptop drives and an abundance of sata ports on my mb, might as well find some use for them.
 
RecentlyAdded said:
I know failure rate will be a factor, but its going to be a steam drive and VMs..all backed up
I have a stack of 2.5" laptop drives and an abundance of sata ports on my mb, might as well find some use for them.
Click to expand...
RecentlyAdded said:
I'm goimg to strip together five 2.5 hhd to see if it gets close to ssd performance ad back it up on a single big HHD
Click to expand...

Random seeks will kill you for the VMs, striping or not. For Steam it depends on the game. Loading DCS will suck, other games might speed up from the stripe.
 
RecentlyAdded said:
So is it actually worse on 5 HDD striped vs 1 HDD?
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I don't know that game, but it's probably more the difference between HDD(s) and an SSD. Though the RAID driver probably does at a touch of overhead. And yes, running VM guests off of any HDD setup is painful.

If you need a moderate amount of storage on the cheap, just get a SATA SSD. Good 1 TB 2.5" units only cost ~$50-60. On sale, it's possible to get good PCIe 3 NMVe units of the same capacity for not too much more.

Old 2.5" HDDs might be fine in a USB enclosure if you have a use for that. If they're on the larger side maybe for mass storage such as music/video/etc. where latency and throughput are not concerns. Otherwise, it may just be time to recycle them.
 
BlueLineSwinger said:
Old 2.5" HDDs might be fine in a USB enclosure if you have a use for that. If they're on the larger side maybe for mass storage such as music/video/etc. where latency and throughput are not concerns. Otherwise, it may just be time to recycle them.
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Does anyone know of a USB enclosure for multiple 2.5" HDDs? That doesn't cost beacoup bucks?
 
philb2 said:
Does anyone know of a USB enclosure for multiple 2.5" HDDs? That doesn't cost beacoup bucks?
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I have both of these.. used them for video editing primarily.. however I'm now all SSD (no more spinners other than an external 20TB backup drive).

On Amazon.. $75 Sabrent - 4 slot 2.5" enclosure but you are limited in height (no 5tb 15mm drives). I have 4 1TB SSDs in it. JBOD only, but you can raid in Windows.

On Ebay.. 2 slot 2.5" USB-C enclosure for 2 15mm HDD drives. I think it was about $60, can't find a link for it now. Does RAID in hardware (or windows) or leave in JBOD mode.

edit.. Startech makes the 2 slot case but it's out of stock.
 
As mentioned, it's all about the latency, not the throughput. Thats why Optane felt 'fast' even though its throughput was half that of the competition in a lot of cases.

I always look for the latency scores in reviews, not the raw MBps.
 
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RecentlyAdded said:
Is latency what I experience when I copy a file, takes a 1sec or 2 for the copy to start ?
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Yup! It's the whole "We need a file! Okay which one? This one! Okay hold on we'll go find it.......there, now lets get that data and load it up, spin that platter, get it up to speed...now send out that read/write head and get that data that's fragmented over 5 different places on the slow inner part of the drive platter! Back and forth we physically go...yayyyy!"

Save mech drives for archiving data.
 
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