Looking for ideas on active storage (non SSD) for new PC build

Kainzo

Gawd
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Nov 12, 2009
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I'm thinking of getting two 4TB HDDs and setting them up in a ray, what do you guys think?

Its been a long ass time since I've done a new build and was going for a M2 1TB ssd with two raid'd hard storage.

Anyone have thoughts?
 
If you want an opinion, you're going to have to present more details. Need to at least know what you intend to accomplish or what your goal is.
 
If you want an opinion, you're going to have to present more details. Need to at least know what you intend to accomplish or what your goal is.

Gaming machine. I want active storage so I can put games I dont intend to play immediately and maybe my music collection.
 
With two drives, you have two options. Since we don't know your goal, I'll just discuss both.

RAID 1 is for protection against a drive failure. It won't help in the case of corruption like viruses or whatever, but it'll protect against the physical failure of a disk.
RAID 0 is for performance, as well as letting you combine the capacity of your drives.

For a "games and music" drive, I would assume RAID 1 is likely overkill. Most PC gamers get their stuff via Steam/Epic/Uplay/whatever these days and those can always be re-downloaded should a drive failure occur.
Additionally, the idea of RAID 0 for "performance" on mechanical drives is pretty laughable; even a single old-ass SSD will spank a modern RAID 0 array of 7200 RPM drives in terms of performance.

Unless you specifically need 4TB/8TB of data capacity, which per Newegg could cost you between $162 and $210 depending on brand and RPM for 2x 4TB disks, then I would consider putting that money towards additional SSD storage. $200 can buy you a 2TB SATA SSD, which will be much better in terms of day-to-day use.

If you *do* need the capacity, a single drive is likely fine.
 
Pretty much agreed.

RAID 0 for HDDs in a desktop is pretty much a non-starter. Better to go with a single larger drive. (In fact, outside of scratch drives, RAID 0 pretty much doesn't belong anywhere in a desktop/workstation setup.)

RAID 1 for media/game storage would also be a bit odd. You're not really concerned about uptime. For media, it'd be better to have a backup somewhere. For games, those should probably be running off of a SSD anyways.
 
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