BinWeevil321

My idea behind the number of drives was that I add drives where and when I need them, I’m heading to university at the end of the year so I’ll be buying a new drive dedicated to uni work and I want to plan in advance for when I add more storage. Eventually I’ll keep upgrading and my have a drive for photos, video editing, work, etc. The drive I’m planning to buy is a 6TB WD Black (and will buy more of when the time comes that I need another drive). This is the largest drive size for WD Black. I’m going with this drive for a number of reasons: I’ve seen good reviews for it. It’s fast and I don’t want to be stuck with something slow. 6TB is on the upper size of drives, so it’s future proof. 16TB as you suggest is slightly overkill for what I plan to use it for, and I feel like if I got a 16TB then I’d end up not using a lot of it. I’ve got to have the same brand throughout my build or I’ll never be able to live with myself. My current M.2 setup I won’t be changing. I have a 250GB and 1TB, both WD Black. The 250GB is used for my operating system, and the 1TB for my games. These are the things I use the most so they’ll be staying on the M.2s. There are two additional M.2 slots on the motherboard, but they disable the second PCIe x16 slot, when being used, so if I ever want to buy a second GPU or need something to be put in a 16x slot then I wouldn’t be able to. I don’t want to build a second system right now, as it would only be supporting my desktop computer, so I feel I might as well just put the drives in the desktop. I’m not very well educated with how NASs work, so if there are other benefits that I can get from a NAS then please inform me :).

I’d be using the onboard SATA ports for the SSDs, so I’d need some way of getting additional SATA ports as I only have six, and one (possibly two, still unsure) SATA ports will be disabled.

I recently built an overkill PC system, that I plan to use for a long period of time. I spent a lot of money so that I don’t need to buy a new one in the near future, and I only to need to upgrade and maintain where needed. So before you call my future storage plans overkill, that’s the purpose. I’m leaving for university at the end of the year so now is the time when I really want to start putting my future storage plans into place. Currently, I have two NVMes, one for my OS and one for all of my games. I also have a random old HDD for all the other random stuff I collect to be thrown on. My motherboard (ASUS ROG Maximus XI EXTREME) storage specifications are as follows: 2 motherboard NVMe slots (currently being used) 2 expansion NVMe slots (not landing to use as it disables the second 16x PCIe slot) 6 SATA ports I want to also buy a 1x expansion card with four SATA ports as well. My future idea is that I have my two NVMes, 4 HDDs and 4 SSDs. The HDDs will be using the 1x expansion as to not lose any of the SSDs speed by putting it through PCIe rather than the onboard SATA ports. My questions for this are as follows: Would this work with the motherboard? I’ve seen loads of things around my motherboard saying if I put one thing in one spot then it will disable something else, and it’s got me all jumbled up. How many SATA ports are disabled from having two NVMes? I know a lot of motherboards disable a SATA port if using NVMe so I’m not not sure if the motherboard disables one or two from using two. Also which ports are disabled? Does using the 1x port disable anything? How much does using a 1x PCIe to out SATA through slow down my drives? Are there any other considerations I should take? Does doing anything disable more SATA ports/slow them down, is there something I can do that disables the 1x PCIe that I need to worry about, etc. I’ve searched all over for the answers but my scenario is quite specific so I’m struggling to find an answer. I’ve look in my motherboard’s manual, and the I’m finding the information too vague to gain anything from it. Thanks for any support and advice you can give me on this.