How do you organise your storage these days?

danlightbulb

danlightbulb

danlightbulb

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In the old days of hard drives I had the OS on one drive or partition, and all the apps/games on another.

When I built my pc originally in 2016 I bought a 240gb SSD. Obviously outgrew this pretty quick so I bought a 1Tb SSD to go with it. Currently have OS on the original drive which is half full and all the games on the 1tb drive which is now nearly full.

Since then, m2's have become common. Then with a big capacity M2 you go back to having it all on one drive.

I have a spare 500gb SSD sitting unused at the moment. So I could plug this in the pc for extra storage. But then I'd have to mess around moving some apps to the drive and keeping some on the bigger drive. Or I could get a 2tb M2 and shift everything to that, but that will fill up too in not too long of a timeframe.

So how is the best way to organise storage these days?
 
Drives are currently very cheap
I have replaced all mine with 5 x m2 drives
Got 2 windows installs
For redundancy reasons i can switch between them

All my 2.5 ssds I throw into windows storage spaces
Can use different sizes,manufacturers, sata,m2,etc
Unlike raid it doesn't care and you don't lose space
If say you used a 250gb and a 500gb
Still get 750gb
One storage pool has OS backups
Another pool has a copy of the games drive
So if games drive failed wouldn't need to redownload
Hundreds of GBs of games

Main thing is I have multiple backups of everything
Even backups of the backups lol
 
Mcnumpty2323 said:
I have replaced all mine with 5 x m2 drives
Click to expand...
Don't you still have to figure out where you want to put stuff though, in this set up. Whether M2 or SSD, you still have an OS drive (two in your case), plus presumably dedicated drives for other functions.


Mcnumpty2323 said:
All my 2.5 ssds I throw into windows storage spaces
Can use different sizes,manufacturers, sata,m2,etc
Click to expand...
Id not heard of this, thanks, sounds interesting, could be good solution for game drives, adding more drives just add to pool and steam sees it as one drive.



Also backups of everything, in my case would require an extra 1.5Gb local storage, plus whatever back ups I decide for the 2Tb home NAS. My backup strategy is currently poor. It would become quite costly though, and every time you need more drive space, you also need more back up space. Very quickly Im into a mountain of drives attached to either PC or network. Doesn't sound efficient - what would you do if you had to build a new PC from scratch today, in terms of your storage? How would you minimise complexity and maximise storage and back up capability?
 
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main NVME for windows and programs only
1 NVME for games that benefit from uber fast storage.
1 SSD for games that dont require such uber speeds, downloads etc.
the SSD is only 2TB so I also have converted an old 4TB HDD to a USB drive. because I dont have gigabit internet, when I run out of space I tend to offload games to this drive instead of straight up uninstalling, as I might play them again :)
I rely a lot of Gdrive for my personal files so that If a drive does get bricked my life doesnt get bricked with it, but also keep various documents on usb thumb drives etc.
It works for me!
 
Yeah still need to decide where to put stuff
Depends on how much stuff you have
Modern games can be huge

Lot of people never heard of storage spaces
Not only is it very versatile
It's very resilient (REFS file system)
Replace motherboard etc it's still there
Reinstall windows still there
As long as you don't accidentally format it during install

You allocate a storage pool a size during set up
But that size can exceed the actual drives you currently have
I set 20TB so in future can add much bigger drives
You're only limited by the amount of sata,m2 ports your motherboard has
Though its possibly doable to include add in cards
Like asus hyper m2 etc
Never tried that
It supports redundancy/mirror drives etc

It's sort of similar to raid
But you're not dependent on a hardware raid controller
So switch motherboard no problem
 
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serious_adam15 said:
main NVME for windows and programs only
1 NVME for games that benefit from uber fast storage.
1 SSD for games that dont require such uber speeds, downloads etc.
Click to expand...
So in my case I only have 1 M2 slot. So that itself brings a dilemma, because ideally you'd have the OS on it and segregate your games, but its waste of the slot to only go for an OS drive in terms of size - OS drive only really needs 250Gb for me. So it feels like a waste of capacity, but having say a 2Tb m2 in there for games means if I want to segregate OS, its on a slower SSD.

It seems like this Windows storage spaces is solving this problem, maybe. Pooling all your storage sounds like a good idea with regard to having to manage multiple drives, but how does it manage the OS, is it still advisable to segregate that? If so, and the OS is better on m2, then Im still in the space of having a wasted m2 slot with a small capacity drive.
 
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Yes it could get expensive
It's a personal choice is your data worth the cost
Of the drives required
There's also mechanical drives to keep costs down
But I detest using them as so used to solid state speeds

Storage spaces (currently at least) is not bootable
so it's segregated from the OS by default
It still works whether you have everything on C drive
Or if you partition C
Or have OS on C and games on D etc

Say your motherboard has 6 x sata ports
You could pick up 6 x 2.5 ssds of 500gb relatively cheap
In MM
Or some 500gb some 1tb
Not looked at 1tb price lately
Or of course use any ssds you Currently have around

even using 2.5 ssds for game Storage
They aren't slow as such still 500MBs maybe 550MBs
Booting windows on a 7,000 MBs m2
It's still actually hard to tell the difference
Between it and a 2.5 ssd
Where the m2 drives really shine is having
More than 1 of them
Copying files Between them does blow away 2.5 ssds

With only 1 x m2 slot I would probably get a 1tb m2
As currently they're at a very good price point per gb
OS and the games you're Currently playing on it
 
You're building a new pc from scratch, within reason a large budget. You need an OS, obviously, and space for big games, a few apps, some local hobby work eg video editing, photo editing or dev work, whatever floats your boat.

How do you configure your storage?
 
danlightbulb said:
So in my case I only have 1 M2 slot. So that itself brings a dilemma, because ideally you'd have the OS on it and segregate your games, but its waste of the slot to only go for an OS drive in terms of size - OS drive only really needs 250Gb for me. So it feels like a waste of capacity, but having say a 2Tb m2 in there for games means if I want to segregate OS, its on a slower SSD.

It seems like this Windows storage spaces is solving this problem, maybe. Pooling all your storage sounds like a good idea with regard to having to manage multiple drives, but how does it manage the OS, is it still advisable to segregate that? If so, and the OS is better on m2, then Im still in the space of having a wasted m2 slot with a small capacity drive.
Click to expand...
I have personally never heard of storage spaces but sounds pretty cool.

If that wasnt an option, you could probably benefit from a higher capacity M2 and create a partition for everything else you want to split up. Or just pick up another SSD and throw it in to increase capacity.
 
New pc from scratch
I Would have a motherboard with several m2 slots
Where m2 really outshine 2.5 ssds
Is when moving files Between them
So 2 x m2
One for OS and one for stuff that's
Regularly transferred between it an C drive
Scratch files for video editing for example

I would still have 2.5 ssds in storage pools
Because its lower cost option than m2s
And still gives redundancy if a drive fails
But you still get 500--550MBs and fast access times

I would start by deciding what data is irreplaceable
And what isn't
Delete stuff I will never use again
Compress backups
Until I know how much data I am dealing with

500gb 2.5 ssds come up in MM often
Very cheaply
If motherboard has 6 x sata ports
Not expensive to have 3tb
Not seen a 1tb in MM for a while
But with storage spaces you can throw a couple in
As doesn't matter if different sizes

Should also say it's not limited to 1 storage space
I have 2 storage pools
 
danlightbulb said:
You're building a new pc from scratch, within reason a large budget. You need an OS, obviously, and space for big games, a few apps, some local hobby work eg video editing, photo editing or dev work, whatever floats your boat.

How do you configure your storage?
Click to expand...

Quickest NVMe drive you car afford/mobo supports for OS plus some main apps - 1Tb should be more than sufficient. Then just use extra NVMe/SSD for games, video/photos etc.

You're really overthinking it. I tend to stick to the rule of keeping only things that can be downloaded and reinstalled on the C drive - as that's most likely to either fail due to hardware fault, or become corrupted due to various reasons. At least that way a reinstall is a much easier task.
 
Semple said:
Quickest NVMe drive you car afford/mobo supports for OS plus some main apps - 1Tb should be more than sufficient. Then just use extra NVMe/SSD for games, video/photos etc.

You're really overthinking it. I tend to stick to the rule of keeping only things that can be downloaded and reinstalled on the C drive - as that's most likely to either fail due to hardware fault, or become corrupted due to various reasons. At least that way a reinstall is a much easier task.
Click to expand...
To be fair, people have gaming laptops with a single large capacity nvme drive
 
danlightbulb said:
You're building a new pc from scratch, within reason a large budget. You need an OS, obviously, and space for big games, a few apps, some local hobby work eg video editing, photo editing or dev work, whatever floats your boat.

How do you configure your storage?
Click to expand...

For me it's your backup solution that drives how you should configure your drives, partitions sizes etc.

I would start by working out what files are absolutely essential and therefore need a priority backup solution. This would dictate the size of your first backup resource, be this a cloud or and external back up drive. E.g. you might want to image your C drive regularly, for an easy boot drive reinstall, and your documents. If this can all fit on one xGB external drive, or a cloud service, then that's one storage amount sorted. Or if you want to work backwards from the size of your backup drive, then that obviously dictates the size of your C drive and documents partition. I prefer to keep it simple and match the partitions I want to back up to the size of my external drives, so it is real easy to plug in and sync as and when and know that the external drive will never get too full.

After that, it depends on how much more you will be needing to back up. If you need occasional back ups of other files, then the size of those partitions is dictated by your other external backup drives, and so it goes. If you also have a NAS which can act as a pseudo backup for non critical stuff, then that will have you covered. Also, you can constantly sync to a NAS for an additional level of security.

So if after this you decide you have a load of other stuff you don't care about if you lost, or know that it could be re-downloaded, e.g. games, then that would probably end up as one of these storage spaces of just a bunch of 2.5" SSD disks clagged together.

Edit: I remember I asked a question about this storage space idea a while back if it mattered if the different ssd's all had different speed specs, and I think the consesus was that the pool would run at the speed of the slowest drive. So mixing sata and m.2 ssd's would probably work but would suffer on speed.
 
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Much better explanation bubo
Sort of what I was trying to say but you
Worded it much better

As for storage spaces
If you mix 2.5 sata ssds and m2 nvme drives
It doesn't exactly run at the speed of
The slowest drives
Not constantly
You would also get bursts of the higher speed
Whilst data was being written to the m2 drives
Assuming of course you're moving data
To the storage space from a nvme m2 drive
Ie as fast or faster than the drives in
The storage pool
If moving it from a 2.5 ssd then yes
Will only get 500--550MBs

So it's not like mixing ram speeds
Where you can only get the speeds of the
Slowest modules
As the faster modules default to slowest speed
 
I never partition my drives, so my OS games, docs, pics and music are all on my main WD SN850X 4TB NVMe. I also have a Samsung 8TB SATA SSD for more storage which I mainly use for games I'm playing the least and lots of other random stuff.

Not a lot changes during a month so I just do a full clone of my drive to a 2TB NVMe monthly, so at least if my main drive dies I can just pop in another drive and be up and running in a few minutes if needed. I hate splitting data over many drives and partitions myself.

I do use a a 2 bay Synology NAS as well which has 2x 18TB drives and used only to stream all my movie and tv shows with plex locally and remotely, this also gets fully backed up to the cloud a daily because loosing over 12TB of films and tv shows so far would be a nightmare to redo.
 
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2TB M.2 for Windows
2TB M.2 for documents
16TB HDD for bulk storage (music, films and tv mostly)
May get a further 16TB HDD at some point, plus matching backup drive (see below)

Most important documents backed up to MS OneDrive
Entire documents drive backed up to the 16TB HDD
16TB HDD backed up to identical 16TB HDD cold storage

May get a Synology NAS at some point, for the backup HDD and also so I don't need my main PC on for Plex access all the time.
 
Organise it how you like, there is no right and wrong. With everything being SSDs, doesn't matter where you put your data, it will all be read from anywhere on the drive at the same speed regardless of how full up the drive is or how aged it is. HDDs got slower as they got older, and as they filled up as the read heads needed to travel a longer distance etc to fetch data.

2 internal NVMe SSDs here

2TB: C: Apps, OS, games, Lightroom working catalog
8TB: M: Documents (re-linked user libraries so they aren't on C any more), manual backups, media, RAW photo files for Lightroom

I then mirror sync the above onto an 8TB SATA SSD which is in a USB 3.1 enclosure which is then kept in a portable pelicase for safe backups.
 
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