How do people generally have their storage drives setup?

Some of my offline hard drives have been failing abruptly with the click of death when I attempt to power them on again and with no spares left to make more copies thought it'd be a good time to finally get a tape drive setup to do proper back ups. Went with a used LTO 5 drive + 37TB of tapes which came to £150 in total. One of my USB hard drives (which annoyingly had some data on it I hadn't made another copy of) died the instant I plugged it into the tape drive computer to create a back-up copy just after it was used 1 minute earlier in another computer. I can only think pulling the 12v DC power cable out was what killed it even though I've done it that way hundreds of times.
 
On my previous PC I had:
1x 1TB Samsung 830 SSD for Windows
1x 2TB Samsung 840 SSD for games
2x 1TB Samsung HDD in Raid 0 for documents and photos

Tragically, I lost both my HDDs and 2TB SSDs somehow with nothing recoverable. Thankfully I also had a NAS where everything had been backed up until last year.

In my new PC I have:
1x 2TB WD SN850X NVMe for Windows and files
1x 2TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe for games

My files are now backed up on OneDrive but I need to reset up my NAS.
 
Currently I have

Gaming PC:
1x 1tb nvme wd black 750 I think as os/apps drive
1x 2tb same drive as games/media
A couple of SATA SSDs also as backups, just for music and docs, not bulk storage

Daily driver PC, is just SATA SSDs
240gb samsung evo os drive
240gb music/docs backup... kingston something or other
1tb Samsung QVO for games/general media
 
I stupidly built an ITX system about 3 years ago now, was a Node 304 so i had the idea of sticking 6 big high capacity drives in it, the GPU is ever so slightly too long to get the last two cages in, so I've currently got about 6-7 external WD MyBook's hooked up.

I desperately need those 24TB drives to come down in price. For years I bought drives that only gave me an extra couple terabytes of space on the previous drive I had, they evaporates extremely quickly with 4k video files and ever increasing game file sizes.
 
Main PC has 1tb NVME, plus a 2 TB SSD for stuff. Streaming box has 1 TB NVME, plus 2x 4TB SSD for storage, no raid or zfs etc., just vanilla. Old server, which acts as a backup machine, has 4x 4TB HDD in ZFS RAIDZ1 pool, plus a 128 GB SSD (my very first one a Crucial M4 from years and years ago!...writing this makes me concerned that's how I've set it up :cry:)

Looking to combine the servers back into one machine, so will end up with the hard drives and the two 4TB SSDs in the machine. Not really sure how to arrange everything then, probably just the same as the ZFS pool is the drive failure mode backup.
 
RAID 1 2 x 8TB in my NAS a backup 8TB for photos and other non replaceable stuff.
It's mostly full of movies and TV series for Plex.

I keep some documents on there and on Google Drive.
I don't store anything on my PCs all on the NAS.

All phones auto backup to the NAS as well.
Getting to the point where I do need to increase storage another 8TB and migrate to RAID5 should give me 16TB.
 
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2 decent 2TB nvme drives in my case (there's been all sorts over the last 2/3 years though).

If you really want to "work it" I'd suggest the optimal performance for money option would be a 1 or 2TB high end NVMe for windows/boot/your currently most played AAA game (with cache, TLC nand, etc). A second, QLC, cacheless wonder, as big as you can afford for everything else

So
1TB Samsung 990/western SN850x/Crucial T700 for boot (that kinda tier of drive, there's other options)

1-4TB Crucial P3/etc for "big stuff" Like steam drive. Buy more if you have space/slots/wallet.

the cheaper drives slow to a crawl after a few tens/hundred GB of writes in a short time but.... that's not really going to be much trouble for something like a steam/movies drive. Generally write once/read many so capacity and read speeds are king.
 
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Just one 2TB NVMe

I never use more than 1TB, I try to just stick to a few games these days and with speedy internet just download what I need.

Everything is backed up to the cloud or actively on the cloud, so not worried about data loss.
 
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Currently due to have 2 m.2 slots in my rig, i have:
1Tb - OS and Apps
2Tb - Games and Data

but i would normally go for:
512gb - OS - and locked
1Tb - Apps
2Tb - Games and Data
 
So i have :

256Gb NVME Boot SSD for Windows
1Tb SATA SSD for game installs ( mainly fortnite )
480Gb SSD for downloads / files waiting to be sorted
4Tb mechanical SATA drive for storage of personal files / film/ tv / mp3s / videos / cd+g files

2x 2Tb external mechanical drives each having a backup of important stuff

Im waiting for 4Tb SSD to come down a bit and ill replace the 4tb mech drive in the main tower
 
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1TB NVME m.2 boot disk
4TB NVME m.2 for current video project files
8TB ( 2 x 4TB SSD in Raid0 ) for dumping old media files used in projects and initial output from projects
14TB Spinner for Backup ( toying with getting another for some Raid goodness )
16TB NAS for Backup and home media centre

I've learned the hard way years ago that you can never have enough layers of backup. Since then I've dodged several bullets with my approach to backups.

Various 1TB SSDs kicking about that I use for various jobs like
  • Rescue disks / crucial offline backups ( Family pics and movies along with music collection)
  • Sharing large files
  • Just in case....
... and a Samsung 2TB T7 used for recording PRORES LOG video straight form my iPhone15. BIG files.

... oh yes not to forget the 3TB USB3 external HDD sitting in one of my drawers which I used mainly for backup before I upgraded some of my drives.

Not sure if I've quite got enough :D
 
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Just upgrading so thought I would post here

1x Synology 918+ with 24TB in Raid (SHM) (16TB effective) (3 drives)

and at my parents

1 x Synology 220+ with 28TB in Raid (SHM) (14TB effective) as a mirror, (2 drives) Which my parents also use for file storage

The 2 NAS mirror to each other

I then have 1 x Synology 120 with a single 14TB, which one of the other NAS back ups to using Hyperbackup once a week.

I use for 4 things mainly;

1. Family Photos and documents
2. Plex
3. Home Assistant (using Container Manager)
4. Storing my YouTube Footage.
 
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