Harddrive Upgrade Advice, Please.

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Taunton
At the moment I've got 4 Sammy drivers. 2 x 250GB, 1 500GB and 1 750GB. They're setup as follows

250GB(1) - C: (OS) / E: (Games)
250GB(2) - D: (Downloads) / F: (Music)
500GB - H: (Videos)
750GB - K: (Backup)

I basically want a faster system, with less harddrives and more storage... Too much to ask for?

I don't mind compacting some of the drives so its Music, Videos & Downloads, then OS and Games on another, but I know I obviously want the backup drive seperate.

I'm just stuck as to... whether to RAID or not? What drives to get? What sizes to get??
 
So much to choose!
You could go Raid1 for protection, size depends on your wallet!
NAS for ease, protection etc, again, your wallet!
Personally, move your 750GB to C: - OS & Games
Get a NAS with 2x1TB drives in Raid1 for everything else and protection. You can backup to that and have loads of space still. Also, when you upgrade as NAS has everything no need to mess about setting up new drives or rebuilding Raid arrays.

How full are all the drives?
 
Drives are pretty full and filling continuouosly.

I spose not too bad, 542.4GB/931GB Used. I don't think it'd be too bad if a lot of them were on the same drive as my videos drive has over 200GB free, but my games on the other hand has only 24GB left, was just 9GB earlier.

Was actually looking at either getting 2 Sammy/WD 640's in RAID 0, then having the 750 as backup OR 2 Sammy 750's in with a 1TB as backup. Obivously the latter is bit more expensive.

£117 for option 1 (WD Black 640's) - totalling 1.3TB and 750GB backup.
£144 for option 2 - Totaling 1.5TB storageand 1TB backup.

The only thing I'm thinking is if I do put them in RAID 0 then I stand to loose a lot of data, if running them seperately then I could get pretty decent performance over my 250 8MB cahce? and still have loads of storage. Could keep it practically the same. but maybe have it OS, Downloads and Games on one drive and then Music and Videos on the other. I'm just thinking how much I'd need to replace if one of the discs was to fail.
 
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I suppose not but at the moment I don't have 1.5TB of data. That's just for future proofing. I could do without backing up my games as I have the installs for them all so it's not really necessary, only my Steam folder as I'm not downloading ~35GB of game data.

Main concern is music, videos, tv series, pictures and documents.
 
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Get another 750GB drive, use Raid1 and put ya music, videos, pictures etc on that. Also point your personal documents folder here so steam data is on there. The mirror will give you data protection.

Then either use the 2x250GB drives in Raid0 for speed, or get another 500GB and use that in Raid0 for speed AND space for your OS & games

Assuming they are SATA then cost could be as little as £64 for Samsung 750GB
or most is £109 for Samsung & Hitachi 500GB (£45)

OR

How about 2x750GBs in Raid1 for data and 3x250GBs in Raid5 for speed and protection for your OS & games?!
 
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I wanna try and keep costs as low as possible.

I wouldn't mind RAID 0 but if one of them was to fail I'd stand to loose a lot of data. If I used RAID 1 then I'd loose a lot of harddrive space. I just want something that is a little faster than my 250 sammy, which considering it's 3 years old, I'd expect a lot of harddrives to be better. And I want to cut down the number of physical drives I have.

My original plans were just 1TB sammy and 750GB sammy for backup. But after thinking about it for a while I was thinking of trying RAID 0 for speed and size.
 
Oh, I'm not disregarding your advice, it's very helpful and so thank you for taking your time to reply. I'm just still not sure what I want.
 
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