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?
 
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!
 
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.
 
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).
 
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.
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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
 
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.
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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?
 
Vince said:
You don't need double but I think how mine are currently configured i get 1 hot spare so effectively if I had 8x 4TB I would lose 1x 4TB drive as a hot spare. So total volume would be 28TB of the 32TB available to the NAS. You do lose a bit but having some redundancy built in will pay dividends in the long run.
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so what actually happens when one drive fails in that set up? can you just physically remove the failed drive and all your data is one the remaining drives?

Mcnumpty2323 said:
Yeah I didn't want to mention
Never mind the cost
In case gave them a heart attack lol
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I am thinking that I should buy her another 8TB drive (for £170) and tell her to make some extra copies on that drives of her important files!
 
Alan1969 said:
I am thinking that I should buy her another 8TB drive (for £170) and tell her to make some extra copies on that drives of her important files!
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although thinking about she wont routinely keep that backed up (hence the mess that we are in now with her having 28TB of storage when its not necessary just because she dosent keep her files clean) and that the NAS with redundancy will avoid her having to do anything.
 
Vince said:
Correct - Simply remove the broken drive (all data is still safe and accessible) - pop a new drive in and she rebuilds herself like nothing happened.
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amazing - I will probably have to go down this route for her. I am getting bored and would like a new challenge and something new to learn (and some new equipment) and this sounds like it.
 
if I get one of these then it can be house at my house and she doesn't need to physically have it at derby Uni. her PC is heavy enough for me to carry (probably due to the amount of HDD's in it) there and back during the holidays as it is. yes when I set it up it will force her to move/tidy her stuff.
 
Vince said:
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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what jobs etc did your computer science degree lead onto?

although my daughter is studying games modelling and animation hey say that only a small proportion go onto making games, and for my daughter she got lymphatic cancer the 1st week into her course and is still weak now and having to forgo the placement (and probably wont want to move far for a job) - hence even less likely to get some jobs -(although presumably she may be able to work from home?)
 
Vince said:
She will even be able to access her files remotely. Win, win!

I should probably explain that almost all nas devices come with this provision.
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will she notice any lag? can she install her steam games and application programmes on the NAS? is there anything other than windows that shouldn't go on the NAS?

Obviously I don't want to spend too much and hence buying 8TB Seagate barracuda computes for £160 rather than ironwold nas 8Tb for £230. Am I ok to stick to the cheaper compute HDD's as say getting a total of 4 HDD's (she already has 2) and the NAS is a few hundred£.
 
Vince said:
Sounds like a solid plan to me. Id enforce cleanage before new toys become available.
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thanks Vince for pointing me in the direction of a NAS.

I have just got one (for £250 with 8 x 3TB NAS HDD - https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/t...astation-24tb-2-x-gen8-microservers.18877629/) and am just setting it up. So far it seems like a nice bit of kit. I have configured as RAID 5 and set up folders and users. I just need to finish doing the web access and then to map the NAS to our home computers - and to totally figure our accessing it over the internet and if its secure.
 
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