lots of internal 3.5" HDD's

Alan1969

Alan1969

Alan1969

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My daughter is into the 2nd yr of a computer games modelling and animation degree, and plays a lot of pc games and used to make a few youtube vids.

She has a NZXT440 hyperbeast case with: 1 TB nvme on mobo; 2 x 8TB HDD; 1 x 6TB HDD; 1 x 4TB HDD; 1 x 2TB HDD. She complains that her drives are nearly full! and yet she doesn't make back-ups.

Is this normal? to use this much space? the modelling that she does not seem to tax her pc much (real time rendering using software such as adobe substance painter whose recommended specs are quite low). When I ask her what size file that she creates that she has its mb rather than gb.

According to the nzxt case I can mount a 6th 3.5" HDD on the floor (to make a max of 6 HDD's). most cases that I look at cant house this number of 3.5" drives!

Is this normal? Any advice?
 
Alan1969 said:
My daughter is into the 2nd yr of a computer games modelling and animation degree, and plays a lot of pc games and used to make a few youtube vids.

She has a NZXT440 hyperbeast case with: 1 TB nvme on mobo; 2 x 8TB HDD; 1 x 6TB HDD; 1 x 4TB HDD; 1 x 2TB HDD. She complains that her drives are nearly full! and yet she doesn't make back-ups.

Is this normal? to use this much space? the modelling that she does not seem to tax her pc much (real time rendering using software such as adobe substance painter whose recommended specs are quite low). When I ask her what size file that she creates that she has its mb rather than gb.

According to the nzxt case I can mount a 6th 3.5" HDD on the floor (to make a max of 6 HDD's). most cases that I look at cant house this number of 3.5" drives!

Is this normal? Any advice?
Click to expand...

Put simply - No it is not. 28TB of data for a single modelling course with no backups. Hell no it isn't normal. Also id be questioning if all 28TB are genuinely used for modeling etc seems incredibly unlikely to me. You sure she isn't torrenting the world and that the PC is in fact full of copious amounts of illegally downloaded films, music and software? Id put almost 0% chance that even 10TB is genuine work.

Fwiw I did a games programming, 3d modelling etc as part of my computer science degree and the projects we tended to work with were all relatively small, normally something like VRML with simple models and were more to get to grips with fundamentals of modelling and writing code to manipulate the models. Mind you even once rendered out and with the project files saved a very detailed model say 90,000 polygons and a decent level of detail you are looking at <30mb for the model files.

for example:



rendered out you might be looking at 100 or so mb, so if you extrapolate that out in models alone you would need 40 relatively high detail models for 1gb so 40,000 high detail models to fill a TB. you see where I am going with this... 28tb would in fact be 1.12 million models.

Video and youtube editing is a little different but I wouldn't expect that you would keep all A roll after a video is published because well at that point it is on youtube. so unless there are vast amounts of video it imo is still super unlikely. Perhaps she is ripping blue ray movies? a typical blue ray is 15gb to 30gb in size so that 28tb usage is around 1000 blue ray movies worth of space consumed.

Im just trying to point out the scale here.... Do you think your daughter has made 1.12 million high detail models or has ripped nearly 1000 blue rays to her machine? This is the level of data hording we are talking about here.
 
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My daughter is a hoarder. I can imagine that she has kept files all of sorts of things that she doesn't need.

When I got her the sampsung 960 evo 1 tb nvme a few years ago (which cost >£400) for her C drive I told her to keep it empty and use it for windows and her latest project only and then when that project is over transfer it to a HDD. That never happened. I don't know what data she has on the drives but I don't imagine that it is full of coursework - as mentioned she used to make a few youtubes but doesn't anymore but I suspect that she has multiple copies of the same video at different stages (ie. before and after handbrake conversion). She spends too much time playing games rather than clearing her files!
 
Alan1969 said:
My daughter is a hoarder. I can imagine that she has kept files all of sorts of things that she doesn't need.

When I got her the sampsung 960 evo 1 tb nvme a few years ago (which cost >£400) for her C drive I told her to keep it empty and use it for windows and her latest project only and then when that project is over transfer it to a HDD. That never happened. I don't know what data she has on the drives but I don't imagine that it is full of coursework - as mentioned she used to make a few youtubes but doesn't anymore but I suspect that she has multiple copies of the same video at different stages (ie. before and after handbrake conversion). She spends too much time playing games rather than clearing her files!
Click to expand...

Yes she is my friend. There are whole companies of hundreds of people that don't have the volumes of data your daughter does :)
 
my daughter likes her electronic entertainment. three times a week she goes to her lectures/practical. The rest of the day and night, 7 days a week she is on the computer, playing games, searching the net, watching tv shows and films, on both monitors simultaneously and sometimes playing on the ps4 or ninendo switch on the 2nd monitor (whilst still doing pc things on the other monitor) AND she can have an ipad on her lap and playing on the iPhone all at the same time! - and very occasionally she will be trying to do a little bit of uni work whilst doing the important things of her electronic entertainment. she hardly ever goes outside and if she needs some shopping or some food she will order that over the net and get it delivered. For her granddads birthday again she did not leave her room to get a present and card delivered.
 
Alan1969 said:
my daughter likes her electronic entertainment. three times a week she goes to her lectures/practical. The rest of the day and night, 7 days a week she is on the computer, playing games, searching the net, watching tv shows and films, on both monitors simultaneously and sometimes playing on the ps4 or ninendo switch on the 2nd monitor (whilst still doing pc things on the other monitor) AND she can have an ipad on her lap and playing on the iPhone all at the same time! she hardly ever goes outside and if she needs some shopping or some food she will order that over the net and get it delivered. For her granddads birthday again she did not leave her room to get a present and card delivered.
Click to expand...

Living life in the digital world it would seem. Looks like you dont have much choice than to buy more HDD's - Personally at this point I would be seriously considering a decent NAS like a qnap or something and migrating everything onto that.

Unless she is very organised 28tb of data strewn around the place should make for a lengthy project of sorting and storing. I run 3 different NAS boxes and the qnap are my preferred nas. grab something like this (image from one of my qnap nas boxes):



fill it with some disks and re-purpose her disks into the NAS would be what id be considering.
 
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until recently when I got her the last 8TB HDD, she had trouble moving her files around to tidy them up. Hopefully she can do that now (dream on) - or she will wait to fill that up before doing anything.

I look longingly at modern cases with a max of 4 x 3.5" bays and think that she cannot have them (although her hyperbeast case a thing to look at).
 
Alan1969 said:
until recently when I got her the last 8TB HDD, she had trouble moving her files around to tidy them up. Hopefully she can do that now (dream on) - or she will wait to fill that up before doing anything.

I look longingly at modern cases with a max of 4 x 3.5" bays and think that she cannot have them (although her hyperbeast case a thing to look at).
Click to expand...

That is of course the beauty of a NAS hot swap disks and no messing about with your main rig. It also forces the issue somewhat. If you refused internal disks but agreed to a nas (quite pricey but worth it) that then forces the offload to the NAS while offering at least a bit of redundancy in the disks. It's not a replacement for a backup but is much preferred over no backups and single points of failure. Something worth considering for sure.
 
Vince said:
That is of course the beauty of a NAS hot swap disks and no messing about with your main rig. It also forces the issue somewhat. If you refused internal disks but agreed to a nas (quite pricey but worth it) that then forces the offload to the NAS while offering at least a bit of redundancy in the disks. It's not a replacement for a backup but is much preferred over no backups and single points of failure. Something worth considering for sure.
Click to expand...
I wondered about a NAS drive

is this what I should get?

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/syno...ork-attached-storage-enclosure-hd-0as-sy.html
 
Alan1969 said:
I wondered about a NAS drive

is this what I should get?

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/syno...ork-attached-storage-enclosure-hd-0as-sy.html
Click to expand...

That one is basically a simple 2 disk jobby so probably not fit for purpose given data volumes. Im using 2x 8 drive versions of this: https://www.overclockers.co.uk/qnap-4-bay-network-attached-storage-ts-451-2g-hd-066-qn.html as shown in the image above I also use a Netgear rn214 4 bay nas at home which is a little cheaper but only offers 2 ethernet on load balancing rather than 4 like the qnap.
 
Mcnumpty2323 said:
Wow That's a huge amount of data
And no backups is a disaster waiting to happen
Though what you would need to backup that amount is another matter
Including the length of time required too
Click to expand...

To give an idea I run 2x HP StoreOnce 4500 devices that back up our entire VM estate, they can hold raw data volumes of 24TB each device and are currently operating at a dedupe ratio of 3.72:1 so to back up her data you could opt to spend 10k + on a 4500 :)
 
Alan1969 said:
I previously had a single nas drive and never really got on with it (although it was not like one of these housing that has its own chip).
Click to expand...

Miles away from being the same, with something like a 4 or an 8 bay you can suffer a drive failure or 2 and lose no data providing you have it configured correctly :) id start with at least a 4 bay. And yes she should be considering putting anything of any value on a nas because of the redundancy.

Redundancy however != proper backups.
 
Vince said:
Miles away from being the same, with something like a 4 or an 8 bay you can suffer a drive failure or 2 and lose no data providing you have it configured correctly :) id start with at least a 4 bay. And yes she should be considering putting anything of any value on a nas because of the redundancy.

Redundancy however != proper backups.
Click to expand...
so redundancy - does that mean raid and does that mean I need double the amount of HDD's? ie. for 8TB of data I need two 8TB HDD's as the raid will copy the data onto both disks?
 
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