Best 3TB Hard Drive

demon8991

demon8991

demon8991

Soldato
Joined
7 Jan 2003
Posts
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Location
Gold Coast, Australia
Hi Guys,

I currently have a Crucial M4 128GB and two Samsung F3 1TB drives.

My two Samsung drives are nearing full capacity as I have 900GB of Steam games on one and 900GB of Films on the other.

I want to know what my best option regarding a 3TB hard drive would be? I want it to be pretty quick as like I said my Steam needs to be installed to it.
to it.
 
Why don't you get yourself another 2-3Tb drive and then put all your drives into a RAID
configuration so that you basically have one big drive instead that way you will have an
extra 2-3tb of space and its easier to manage as well?
 
Sorry to sound stupid as I have never done RAID before.

If I buy a 2TB hard drive I could configure raid and have 4TB appearing as one disk in my computer?

If this is the case I would probably be much better creating a RAID for my two Samsung drives to create a 2TB storage option and putting all my film on there and then buying a Western Digital 2TB Black and putting all my Steam games on that.
 
Shadz said:
Yes it will show as 1 disk and yes u would be better
Doing that mate
Click to expand...

So i am guessing that would be a RAID 0 setup.

My only slight concern about this is there is twice the chance that i would lose the data on it should it fail.
 
Forgive my limited raid knowledge but raid 0 has no disk redundancy. Meaning if you put 2 of your 1tb drives in Raid 0 you'll get 2tb but if one disk fails you lose all the data. You could do raid 1 but then you'll only have 1tb to play with.

If you don't mind losing the data (steam folder) then you could raid 0.

Also, combining disks of different sizes in a raid is also something you have to read about. For example, I have a synology NAS and I am running Synology Hybrid Raid which allows you to do this.

Why not just add another 3TB to your system? or Raid 0 the 1TB samsung drives for steam and a 3TB for movies.

Hope this helps.
 
shaf said:
Forgive my limited raid knowledge but raid 0 has no disk redundancy. Meaning if you put 2 of your 1tb drives in Raid 0 you'll get 2tb but if one disk fails you lose all the data. You could do raid 1 but then you'll only have 1tb to play with.

If you don't mind losing the data (steam folder) then you could raid 0.

Also, combining disks of different sizes in a raid is also something you have to read about. For example, I have a synology NAS and I am running Synology Hybrid Raid which allows you to do this.

Why not just add another 3TB to your system? or Raid 0 the 1TB samsung drives for steam and a 3TB for movies.

Hope this helps.
Click to expand...

Yeah that is a very good point as the steam data isnt too much of an issue as i can always get it back so putting the folder on a raid 0 would be a good move! How would my samsung drives fare with regard to speed though?

I could then buy a Western Digital 3TB Green as my storage option as it is cheap for the amount of storage you get and the data on it wont need to have fast read and write times.
 
You'll get speed benefits if they are on raid 0 - how much I don't know.

If speed in games loading is what you're after then you could get another SSD?

I use a second SSD (60g) for games - I have my steam folder on a 3TB HDD but I move games I play often to my SSD. It works well.
 
shaf said:
You'll get speed benefits if they are on raid 0 - how much I don't know.

If speed in games loading is what you're after then you could get another SSD?

I use a second SSD (60g) for games - I have my steam folder on a 3TB HDD but I move games I play often to my SSD. It works well.
Click to expand...

Yeah i am not too fussed about speed just didnt want it to be slower than what i have now.
 
You could have a look at either Drive Bender or Flexraid, as you can then display drives of varying sizes as a single drive, but you do not put your data at as much risk as with hardware RAID. Drive Bender allows for you to replicate important data across more than one physical drive if you want to.
 
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