New system; how many drives?

[Meddling-Monk]

Grabbing a new system soon with the new drops and hopefully older tech reducing in price. But the main question I have here is this:

Wondering how many disks to grab?

One? 1 fast and large boot disk?
Two? 1 fast boot disk + 1 secondary?

Older systems (~2009 to 2015 odd using SSDs) were best served with a primary boot drive with minimal installation material other than the OS, with a secondary larger drive that served as a program (games, etc) storage drive to reduce wear and disk hitching when trying to read and write to the drive at the same time to prevent saturation of the pathways if you're reading and writing heavily at the same time (recording game videos for example would become troublesome if it happened on the same drive with older SATA3 SSDs).

So do I stick with the older drive setup? With modern m.2 NVME Gen 4/3 drives? Or just grab one that is faster and larger?

 

[Glanza]

Depends on how many games you like to have installed, these days going for the biggest gen 4 drive you can afford is the way to go, 1TB minimum gives you room for plenty of games and windows and you're looking usually between £90 - £120

 

[House]

I managed to grab a couple of 2tb WD 850s during OCUKs summer sale (£150 for a PCIE gen 4 7000mbits drive can't be bad), they are sat waiting for my new rig.

I will also bring over an old 250gb samsung sata ssd that i will use as my shadowplay temp storage, i dont really care if it gets trashed with constant write and its more to save my m2s from the load.

and i have 2x 2tb SSHDs that I have as general storage not hot drives, can't think what I will use them for right now, but they will fit in the case so better than leaving them in a draw.

 

[lsg1r]

Depends on what you're doing and your budget in all honesty... but outside of a laptop I'd never go for less than 2 drives...

At a bare minimum I would have an OS/Programs Drive and a second drive for 'Storage' (I move my documents etc to custom folders). Throw a third in if you're into gaming for game folders.

Having said that my current rig has 8 drives...2 nvme and 6 sata ssd's.
Personal preference (and imo it feels faster when transferring etc) rather than necessity but I also don't use my pc for gaming as much as I do 3D work etc.
2x 2TB Nvme - 1 for OS/Programs and 1 for a high speed scratch/temp drive
6x 1TB Sata SSD's are basically for storage and are split up into different categories
- 2 are in a storage spaces mirrored raid for documents (windows 'user folders' are moved here too for easy reinstalls/backup)
- 1 is for purely for downloads... that section gets so much junk I just keep it separate from everything else lol
- 3 are for 'quick access' archival/resources storage type things

I also have external storage for backups like everyone else right

 

[Tetras]

One? 1 fast and large boot disk?
Two? 1 fast boot disk + 1 secondary?

For a secondary drive you can safely go with something cheaper, but I'd hate to buy e.g. a QLC based drive for a primary drive, so my preference is to get a smaller TLC+DRAM drive for the boot drive and a larger, cheaper drive (like the SN570) for the secondary.

I wouldn't worry about the performance of either drive unless you know that you have an I/O bottleneck.

 

[lsg1r]

For a secondary drive you can safely go with something cheaper, but I'd hate to buy e.g. a QLC based drive for a primary drive, so my preference is to get a smaller TLC+DRAM drive for the boot drive and a larger, cheaper drive (like the SN570) for the secondary.

I wouldn't worry about the performance of either drive unless you know that you have an I/O bottleneck.

Agree about QLC and dram, that is exactly the reason I went for the 'older' Crucial MX500 SSD's for my sata drives... not that they're exactly slow for a sata ssd.

I wasn't originally looking at these drives when I was shopping for nvme (they were more expensive but I found a no brainer deal) I can say my Seagate 530's (2TB) has dram and TLC (176 Layer).

 

[Meddling-Monk]

Thanks for the info everyone, I guess I'll try and budget in the old storage setup then even though the 1 main (fast) drive setup would work (as I do capture video whilst gaming a bit more recently and the i/o bandwidth could get a bit tetchy when loading stuff and recording at same time, and of course, Windows deciding it needs to update in middle of a raid/run):

1 x Boot Drive (Gen 4/5) at least 1TB
1 x Program Drive (Gen 3/4) at least 2TB
1 x Video Capture Drive (SSD) at least 2TB (Pulling the old one from this system that was in the original system that died, so really only grabbing the other two)

Along with a NAS and USB flash drive for smaller files for long term and short term storage, as well as a RAM Drive (32/64GB size) for secure temporary storage, I think that's golden for the new rig in two weeks time. Thanks all.

 

[lsg1r]

Thanks for the info everyone, I guess I'll try and budget in the old storage setup then even though the 1 main (fast) drive setup would work (as I do capture video whilst gaming a bit more recently and the i/o bandwidth could get a bit tetchy when loading stuff and recording at same time, and of course, Windows deciding it needs to update in middle of a raid/run):

1 x Boot Drive (Gen 4/5) at least 1TB
1 x Program Drive (Gen 3/4) at least 2TB
1 x Video Capture Drive (SSD) at least 2TB (Pulling the old one from this system that was in the original system that died, so really only grabbing the other two)

Along with a NAS and USB flash drive for smaller files for long term and short term storage, as well as a RAM Drive (32/64GB size) for secure temporary storage, I think that's golden for the new rig in two weeks time. Thanks all.

Honestly you likely won't notice the difference between a gen 3, gen 4 and gen 5 in most use cases. So personally I'd say save you money and just buy gen4 instead of gen5 nvme drives.

One of my nvme drives is on gen4 and one is on gen3. Both are exactly the same drives (2tb seagate 530's) but outside of synthetic benchmarks, where the only difference is sustained throughput is halved everything else is the same, I honestly can not notice the difference. Hell outside of transferring files between drives, where sata connection is obviously the restriction, I can't honestly notice any real difference between my nvme and sata drives..

Can't say I've ever seen a need for a ram drive, are you sure you actually need one of those... not to mention the cost of extra ram etc, which could go on the extra ssd's instead

 

[Quartz]

Wondering how many disks to grab?

1 Boot /OS
1 Data.

NAS.

When I go 10 GbE I'll probably ditch the separate data drive.

 

[Meddling-Monk]

Honestly you likely won't notice the difference between a gen 3, gen 4 and gen 5 in most use cases. So personally I'd say save you money and just buy gen4 instead of gen5 nvme drives.

One of my nvme drives is on gen4 and one is on gen3. Both are exactly the same drives (2tb seagate 530's) but outside of synthetic benchmarks, where the only difference is sustained throughput is halved everything else is the same, I honestly can not notice the difference. Hell outside of transferring files between drives, where sata connection is obviously the restriction, I can't honestly notice any real difference between my nvme and sata drives..

Can't say I've ever seen a need for a ram drive, are you sure you actually need one of those... not to mention the cost of extra ram etc, which could go on the extra ssd's instead

I think I'll only need the Gen 4 or 5 one because some games may end up using that Directstorage thing, which I'm not sure if Gen 3 is supported on. Will need to re-read over that to make sure; certainly will aim Gen 4, unlikely will need Gen 5. If Gen 3 works, can aim lower price without issue, but just want preparation in case it's important for future games (as I don't aim to be updating this system again any time toon; the last one went for 10+ years and if the motherboard didn't die, likely would have remained in use for many more years). So that's really the only reason (directstorage) why I'd be after them (Gen 4/5 over a Gen 3) really.

As for the RAM Drive, it might not be as important anymore, but the older system (before m.2 nvme days), the RAM Drive had a higher speed vs any of the SSDs, and even many modern Gen 3 ones. Often this isn't that big a deal, but I also do Photoshop and Video Editing (After Effects compositing etc). Which with the many different writes after creating, updating and editing, was more responsive when it was stored and ran on the RAM Drive vs SSDs (and also spared the writes, especially when someone asks for the WHOLE piece of art/video to be redone from scratch because that's not what they were after... ). Also, much like my last system; the RAM often is harder to source after a period of time, so it's often easier to source them during initial build and populate the whole motherboard in one go (if price isn't that big a deal), so that for however long the sysytem runs for (10+ years hopefully like the last system) RAM would be the least of your issues if you did need more. If you don't, the RAM Drive is there as temporary storage for whatever you need. But if you do need it, it'll be there.

But cool, I'll go recheck up on the Directstorage thing, see if I can't save some on the drives.

 

[Meddling-Monk]

1 Boot /OS
1 Data.

NAS.

When I go 10 GbE I'll probably ditch the separate data drive.

Aye, that's the setup I've been running for a while now. Also looked at the 10GbE angle to see if I could drop the Data drive, but I've kind of felt that for back up/just in case situations (network cut, switch dead, nas dead, nas drive dead, etc) it would still be good to have a local program/data drive. Much like streaming/online movies, if connection is poor or things go south another way, at least the local disk (Blu Ray) can continue unhindered. But that's just my thoughts on it.