Building first PC - storage advice?

[els1122]

Hello, I am building my first PC with the main purpose of using it for 3D Animation (modelling, rigging, animation and a bit of rendering), and a secondary purpose of some gaming and am looking at which components will fit me best. I'm very new to this so have been doing some research and for my storage I am thinking of an HDD for files I'm not currently using (animation files I've completed/moved on from etc and any other general files), a NVMe for current files and programs such as Maya, Blender, Adobe programs and games, and finally another drive for my OS (Windows) as i've heard it is good to have this on a separate drive. I would really appreciate any thoughts on this and if this sounds good or not - again I'm just learning so I thank you for any input. My budget isn't too big, probably around £1500-£1750 for all the main components, but I believe the principle will probably be the same. Any advice on suggested storage size of each would be great too Thanks in advance!

 

[lsg1r]

Seeing as I do 3D etc (work) and a bit of gaming I think I can answer this
This is my setup to give you an idea of how I've got it set up. It does come in a fair bit more than your budget but you likely don't need it exactly the same so you can adjust accordingly.

Drive 1 - 2TB pcie gen 4 nvme - OS and programs - keep separate from the rest to 'keep it clean' - originally planned for 1TB drives but found 2x 2TB drives at a price I couldn't say no to.
Drive 2 - 2TB pcie gen 4 nvme - Scratch disk (you may need to configure the software to use the second drive but iirc everything you mentioned uses one)
Drive 3 & 4 - 2x 1TB sata SSD's (mirrored by storage spaces) - Documents/Active Projects. I move my user folders (my docs, desktop etc) to this drive, it can easily be 'relinked' if I reinstall.

Now in my case I have another 4x 1TB SSD's which are used for storing stuff (3D assets, media such as tv/music etc) but you can easily get away with a hard drive for this (ideally 2, one could be an external, so you can have it duplicated somewhere else for a little bit of basic protection). Splitting the storage was a personal choice and to be fair I could have used a single larger or multiple smaller hard drives but I basically decided to 'splurge' lol. As to 'archive storage' on a main pc I'd say 4-8TB is the sweet spot, price vs capacity, these days.


I also have an external 6TB USB hard drive which I use for backing up the sata SSD's on a daily basis - this is not for archival, this is for 'peace of mind' in case a drive fails (albeit a rare thing these days).

Longer term storage is taken care of by a nas/blu rays.

Is my setup maybe a little excessive, probably, but when your 'hobby' and your 'work' combine it's never going to be cheap lol.

 

[EsaT]

Unless you have too little RAM causing frequent page file use, there's zero performance reason to have two NVMes.
I/O and bandwidth needs of background log file keeping etc of Windows/software are simply completely meaningless compared to capabilities of NVMe drives.
Having enough RAM is far more performance critical.

And partitioning is there for allowing nuking OS without affecting data.


For "cold" storage nothing beats HDD in capacity per price.
Big budget choise there would be 2.5" SATA SSD, but their capacities are way more limited and prices far higher.

 

[lsg1r]

Unless you have too little RAM causing frequent page file use, there's zero performance reason to have two NVMes.

I/O and bandwidth needs of background log file keeping etc of Windows/software are simply completely meaningless compared to capabilities of NVMe drives.
Having enough RAM is far more performance critical.

While yes you don't 'need' to use an nvme (I had the slot and the cost difference was negligible so....), you can get away with a sata ssd, there is a still a benefit to having a separate scratch disk even with a lot of ram.

And partitioning is there for allowing nuking OS without affecting data.

Been there done that, still prefer the separate drive approach, especially if you ever need to enlarge or shrink the partitions, that doesn't always go smoothly.