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How important is storage? First time builder

Mark1268
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Hey awesome community (=

 

I have been planning my first pc build for a long time now and I am completely guilty of focusing on CPU and GPU. Since I am on a budget and my build is supposed to be geared towards gaming and also some light video and photo editing I wanted to reuse my old storage solution (a very old 1TB WD HDD & a 120GB SanDisk SSD) and put all my money towards the CPU and the GPU.

 

However, I recently stumbled across a video by the filmmaker Dave Dugdale in which he shows that when he switched from an HDD to an SSD for his media drive he got a dramatic performance increase. Even in terms of rendering: A test rendering went from 202 seconds to 40 seconds. Now I am confused if the storage solution is not at least as important as the cpu for rendering...

 

The mentioned video: 

 

Do you have any suggestions what kind of storage solution I should buy? I can't afford an ssd for mass storage but maybe I should buy a new HDD? And if so which one? Is there a big difference between WD Black and WD Blue?

 

My core components as I have currently planed:

Intel Xeon E3 1231 v3

Asus STRIX 970

8GB Ram

 

Thank you for answers in advance (=

 

Ps.: Sorry for any mistakes, I am not a native English speaker.

 

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I see that you have a pretty high end system so yes, go with an ssd. To me personally ssd aren't worth it since my whole system is worth about 750$ and I won't upgrade for a quite long time so spending money for faster boot times, read and write times was not an option

Longboarders/ skaters message me!

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video projects will load MUCH better from an SSD. other things i'd leave on an SSD

 

if you can't afford an SSD i'd buy multiple HDD and put them in RAID

We can't Benchmark like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to shove more GPUs in your computer. Like the time I needed to NV-Link, because I needed a higher HeavenBench score, so I did an SLI, which is what they called NV-Link back in the day. So, I decided to put two GPUs in my computer, which was the style at the time. Now, to add another GPU to your computer, costs a new PSU. Now in those days PSUs said OCZ on them, "Gimme 750W OCZs for an SLI" you'd say. Now where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was that I had two GPUs in my rig, which was the style at the time! They didn't have RGB PSUs at the time, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big green ones. 

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@Mark1268 Nowhere near as important as CPU.

But important, critically so if you render a lot.

Have at least one HDD for mass storage, an SSD for boot/applications and if you do a lot of editing/rendering at least on SSD for scratch.

For day to day use the difference is still very noticeable. Even in my $500 office computers, I've made the switch to SSD + HDD combo and everyone has noticed the difference, even administrative staff who have nothing to do with tech.

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Wow! Thanks for your extremly quick replies!

 

@Dredgy Why the big difference in render time then?

 

Do you have any recommendation for a HDD(1TB) and an SSD(240gb)?

 

Is it a good idea to have an SSD for boot & applications while using it also as an scratch disk? 

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crucial mx100 for the cheap option

samsung 850 evo for the faster option

If you need remote help fixing something on your computer

I can help over Teamviewer if you wish

just msg me on my profile

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wd black as your storage drive

If you need remote help fixing something on your computer

I can help over Teamviewer if you wish

just msg me on my profile

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Wow! Thanks for your extremly quick replies!

 

@Dredgy Why the big difference in render time then?

 

Do you have any recommendation for a HDD(1TB) and an SSD(240gb)?

 

Is it a good idea to have an SSD for boot & applications while using it also as an scratch disk?

The big difference is probably due to storage, though render time isn't the most important thing. If you want to be editing a large project with many layers and effects though, RAM and CPU will be taxed. Depending on transcoder, GPU might also be important.

You can use an SSD as boot and scratch, and all will be good. Having a separate SSD purely for scratch increases performance even more.

Recommendations:

SSD: Sandisk Extreme Pro - 10 year warranty, very stable. Very High performing, works in some professional cameras if you need to repurpose it. Samsung 850 Promis also very high performance while the Sandisk Ultra II or Samasung 850 EVO are also good, solid options on a budget.

HDD: Anything. Seagate Barracuda or Western Digital Green (or any other colour).

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@Mark1268 storage is by far the slowest part of a PC. If what you will be doing with it is limited by storage speeds, then investing in faster storage is worthwhile.

 

If you're doing 'light' photo/video editing, then you will probably not be loading massive projects from your hard drive (tens of GB). Loading games also doesn't demand too much of your storage.

 

If you're gaming and photo/video editing, then the best investment would be in a good CPU/GPU combo. Unless you're doing lots of editing, you probably don't need more than 4 cores, so an i5 would be best in terms of performance per dollar. You don't need the Xeon unless you must have ECC memory, which is probably unnecessary for your purposes.

 

The GPU you've chosen has a good performance per dollar ratio, go for it.

 

8 GB of memory is probably enough for now, you can always upgrade if you realize that you need more.

 

TL;DR - You probably shouldn't focus on your storage as much as your CPU/GPU. However, since your hard drive is an older model you might want to consider upgrading to a newer one anyways, because the new one will be less likely to fail.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use, and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. - Galileo Galilei
Build Logs: Tophat (in progress), DNAF | Useful Links: How To: Choosing Your Storage Devices and Configuration, Case Study: RAID Tolerance to Failure, Reducing Single Points of Failure in Redundant Storage , Why Choose an SSD?, ZFS From A to Z (Eric1024), Advanced RAID: Survival Rates, Flashing LSI RAID Cards (alpenwasser), SAN and Storage Networking

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Hey awesome community (=

 

I have been planning my first pc build for a long time now and I am completely guilty of focusing on CPU and GPU. Since I am on a budget and my build is supposed to be geared towards gaming and also some light video and photo editing I wanted to reuse my old storage solution (a very old 1TB WD HDD & a 120GB SanDisk SSD) and put all my money towards the CPU and the GPU.

 

However, I recently stumbled across a video by the filmmaker Dave Dugdale in which he shows that when he switched from an HDD to an SSD for his media drive he got a dramatic performance increase. Even in terms of rendering: A test rendering went from 202 seconds to 40 seconds. Now I am confused if the storage solution is not at least as important as the cpu for rendering...

 

The mentioned video: 

 

Do you have any suggestions what kind of storage solution I should buy? I can't afford an ssd for mass storage but maybe I should buy a new HDD? And if so which one? Is there a big difference between WD Black and WD Blue?

 

My core components as I have currently planed:

Intel Xeon E3 1231 v3

Asus STRIX 970

8GB Ram

 

Thank you for answers in advance (=

 

Ps.: Sorry for any mistakes, I am not a native English speaker.

 

Hey Mark1268,

Games generally rely on storage only for the loading times. FPS and Graphics stay unaffected so if you don't mind longer load times, you can use pretty much any HDD. Storage could have a bigger impact on editing, but with the 120GB SSD you would have enough space for your more demanding programs and larger files.

Storage generally affects the loading times of your OS, programs and games as well as all transfer speeds within, from and to your system. 120GB SSD + 1TB HDD is a very good and common combination. you can always upgrade or replace a drive without affecting your data. Just make sure you keep a backup of all your important files offsite (a place that is not connected to your computer - external drive, flash drive, CD/DVD, cloud, NAS, etc.).

Both WD Black and WD Blue are good reliable drives and are capable of running programs and perform good during editing.

Captain_WD.

If this helped you, like and choose it as best answer - you might help someone else with the same issue. ^_^
WDC Representative, http://www.wdc.com/ 

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