Spec me a storage solution

bainbridge

bainbridge

bainbridge

Soldato
Joined
9 Dec 2009
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Bristol
Hi folks

I went and broke the rule of backing up the system and now my os needs reinstalling.

This is how I got to where I am now..

When bitten by the pc building bug I ran x3 80gb sata drives in raid0 and backed them up regularly to a 300gb internal drive.

One of the drives started failing so I ended up cloning the os onto the 300gb drive and using this single drive with no back up.

When this was short on space I purchased a wd black 1tb drive and cloned the os to that, just backing up important documents and pictures to the old 300gb drive.

The wd black had a wobble which I managed to restore but should have replaced it pronto, it is now kaput so it's high time I bought all new drives and got back into the habit of backing up, ideally to an external drive. While I'm at it I may as well upgrade to one of those new fangled ssd drives for the os to live on.

Main use of the system is gaming, quite a large number of games need to be installed. My system is as per sig, yes I know it's getting on a bit, gpu will be upgraded soon but at the moment I have no system so the storage issue takes priority.

Any suggestions will be much appreciated, thanks.
 
Buy a 250/500gb Samsung 850 Evo, best upgrade ever. And buy a pair of other drives, WD Blue for example. One for data, the second for backup.

You'll kick yourself for not getting ssd sooner.
 
Also, use something like Hard Disk Sentinel to get a pre-warning of these failures.

Sounds like it's time to buy an SSD anyway. You don't need all your games on the SSD at once - Steam now supports multiple game directories and steam mover works well.

Perhaps a 500gb SSD, then a couple of HDDs in RAID1 for safety?
 
Don't use RAID1 for backup - it's fine to use it for high availability, but also have separate backup.

All RAID protects you from is drive failure, it will not recover accidently deleted files or from malware/virus.
 
Thanks for the advice folks, I took it on board and have 2 drives on their way to me. Bought a samsung evo 850 250gb and one of these due to a number of different drives being out of stock:

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/seag...64mb-cache-hdd-oem-st2000dm001-hd-335-se.html

That'll get me up and running and at least I can install the os and see what can be retrieved from the old drive. I'll also be ordering an external drive after Christmas.

Quick question about the ssd, is it simply a case of connecting it to the mobo via a sata cable, selecting it as the boot drive in bios once the os is installed or is there nlmore to it?
 
Remember..

When installing Windows, only have one drive connected for the install. If possible, put this drive on SATA port 0 (assuming 0 is an SATA-III port)

This prevents any possible future boot issues from removing other drives. Sometimes Windows can put the boot loader on the wrong drive if you have multiple disks connected.

You see people on here with that issue a few times a month.


Once Windows is on there, connect up any extra drives you have.
 
bledd. said:
Remember..

When installing Windows, only have one drive connected for the install. If possible, put this drive on SATA port 0 (assuming 0 is an SATA-III port)

This prevents any possible future boot issues from removing other drives. Sometimes Windows can put the boot loader on the wrong drive if you have multiple disks connected.

You see people on here with that issue a few times a month.


Once Windows is on there, connect up any extra drives you have.
Click to expand...

Thanks bledd, I do this to avoid being confused!

The old windows drive isn't playing ball. When I reconnect it, even with my new ssd as the only boot device in bios, the system tries toi boot into windows on the damaged drive and just hangs.

There is a SATA hot swap feature in BOIS so I've enabled that on the bad drive, disconnected the data cable and will try booting into windows and then connect the data cable with windows already running.
 
In the bios you'll be able to pick to boot order. Might be a separate section for hdd boot order.
 
Also make sure your BIOS' SATA mode is set to AHCI and not IDE, before installing the OS to your SSD.
 
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