should I try something different?

[apopleptic]

Right now I am running windows 7 64 bit on my main pc/server with 5x3TB drives, 6x2TB drives, a 240GB SSD for booting, 2x1.5TB esata drives and 2x2TB usb3 drives. System has 24GB ddr3, a 3570k running at 4.4, and an XFX DD 7950. Currently I have about 17TB of stuff on the drives now that I cleaned out about 5TB of duplicate and unneeded files. I also have a 4TB LG NAS that I backup more important data to.
All drives are NTFS and I serve to 7 or 8 computers over gigabit.

Should I look into switching into another filesystem? Another OS?
what suggestions do people have? what would the benefits be?
I've considered splitting it into a separate gaming rig and server, but I'm not sure I want to.

 

[JoeComp]

Now, how about something completely different?

 

[hotcrandel]

Is any of the data not on the NAS important?
What kind of cards are you using to hook up all the drives?

The reason(s) to consider splitting it off are;

- avoiding a single point of failure. sounds like if your gaming desktop took a dive, you might lose access to your data for the interim.
- your chassis is running out of space for more disks and you need more capacity
- you don't want to run power hungry cpu/gpu's 24/7
- avoiding data corruption due to overclock/crashes etc. sharing disks over the network, your cpu generally doesn't need to be overclocked.
- organization ;less cables outside of the case / less reliance on cheap power bricks for your external drives.
- if you're interested in have one big pool (a large single volume) that spans all your data instead of many drive letters