Hi all,
my MiniPC (NUC 12 Pro Kit, NUC12WSKi3) has 1x2280 PCIe Gen4 M.2 NVMe slot and 1x2242 PCIe Gen3 M.2 SATA slot (no 2.5" SSDs are supported). My use scenario will be: office tasks + storage of media collection (Plex Media Server) + occasional transcoding by Plex.
Since M.2 storage is pretty expensive, I plan to have internally as less as possible (e.g., NVMe 250Gb for apps, cache, temp downloads, etc.), and move maximum of non-system data (i.e., media collection, backups of photos from mobile, etc.) to the external 3.5" SATA III disk of 8-10Tb, connected via USB. The system will be Windows-based.
Can you please help me to understand the following:
my MiniPC (NUC 12 Pro Kit, NUC12WSKi3) has 1x2280 PCIe Gen4 M.2 NVMe slot and 1x2242 PCIe Gen3 M.2 SATA slot (no 2.5" SSDs are supported). My use scenario will be: office tasks + storage of media collection (Plex Media Server) + occasional transcoding by Plex.
Since M.2 storage is pretty expensive, I plan to have internally as less as possible (e.g., NVMe 250Gb for apps, cache, temp downloads, etc.), and move maximum of non-system data (i.e., media collection, backups of photos from mobile, etc.) to the external 3.5" SATA III disk of 8-10Tb, connected via USB. The system will be Windows-based.
Can you please help me to understand the following:
- I know that some apps (incl. Plex) do a lot of writes and indexing, so makes sense to separate such apps from their cache. AFAIK, NVMe disks have at least 3.5Gb/s read/write speeds, while SATA has only 0.6Gb/s. So should I use M.2 SATA as a "system disk" and M.2 NVMe as a "cache disk" for fastest performance? Any good "rule of a thumb" for the system/cache disks size ratio?
- USB-connected drives are not friendly with either BTRFS, or Unraid or ZFS file systems. [besides, I am only familiar with Windows] Since data protection on the file system level isn't available to me, are there any Windows tools (system ones or standalone apps) to somehow secure my data on the external HDD, or this is not possible at all without at least 1 more HDD (to mirror the first one, in e.g. such box)?