Advise on storage in new build

[BoringMadman]

I am working on a new build, I am up to the point of decide what I want for storage. I am hoping for some suggestions as the option around storage seems endless.

 

I am building a gaming / Entertainment rig. So Gaming performance is top of the list. I also stream movies and YouTube a lot. After 20 years of saving stuff like music, excel workbooks etc. I have about one terabyte of data not including the OS and program installs. So I am not overly concerned with the amount of Storage. I am how ever very interested in how fast the rig will boot and load programs.

 

I have selected (ATM) the 

Gigabyte Z390 AORUS XTREME WATERFORCE EATX LGA1151 Motherboard

Intel Core i9-9900K 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor

 

the Motherboard has two M.2 slots plus a third for Octane memory (That I beleave will not do me any good). it also has 6 sata port but you lose 3 of them if you use both of the M.2 slots. I plan to only use SSD hardware but I guess the real question is how to best lay these drive out. Would I benefit from some kind of raid? I do want at least two "Drives" one for OS and applications and one for data storage. but maybe three would be better OS/ Application and file storage.

IDK and thoughts or advice would be appreciated.

 

[Senzelian]

You obviously want to play games and you want those games to load fast. So I definitely recommend a large SSD for that. Preferably 1TB.

This doesn't need to be a NVMe SSD.

 

For your OS you'd want something with fast access times and great random write and read performance.

This doesn't need to be NVMe either, but because prices were coming down a lot and because we're only talking about a small size (I recommend 256GB), you might aswell go with a NVMe drive.

 

All of your multimedia data that doesn't require fast access times or high bandwith would still do just fine on a conventional harddrive, but if you want to safe those onto a SSD too, then get either another 1TB SATA SSD or increase the capacity of the other 1TB SSD to 2TB.

 

This is what I'd go for:

• 250GB Samsung 970 Evo
• 1TB Micron 1300, Samsung 860 Evo, Adata SU650, Transcend SSD230S
• 1TB 7200 RPM HDD 
  
  or
   
• 250GB Samsung 970 Evo
• 2TB 860 Evo, Crucial MX500, Adata SU800, Micron 1300

[Semper]

Unless you're incredibly impatient, any quality SSD should be realistically fast enough without RAID.

I'm on an "old" MX200 for my boot drive. From completely shut down, to operational in Windows 10 is about 9 seconds. (currently, I sit at a 4.3 second BIOS time, with the remaining time used to establish my startup programs).

I don't have much experience with long load time apps/programs, the Adobe suite being some of the longest at maybe... 15 seconds?, but RAID would help with that.

A fairly standard setup is an SSD boot drive (i'd recommend one of your M.2 slots for this), potentially a "fast" mass storage in the form of an SSD, and "slow" mechanical storage for everything else.

[Rusted]

12 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

You obviously want to play games and you want those games to load fast. So I definitely recommend a large SSD for that. Preferably 1TB.

This doesn't need to be a NVMe SSD.

 

For your OS you'd want something with fast access times and great random write and read performance.

This doesn't need to be NVMe either, but because prices were coming down a lot and because we're only talking about a small size (I recommend 256GB), you might aswell go with a NVMe drive.

 

All of your multimedia data that doesn't require fast access times or high bandwith would still do just fine on a conventional harddrive, but if you want to safe those onto a SSD too, then get either another 1TB SATA SSD or increase the capacity of the other 1TB SSD to 2TB.

 

This is what I'd go for:

• 250GB Samsung 970 Evo
• 1TB Micron 1300, Samsung 860 Evo, Adata SU650, Transcend SSD230S
• 1TB 7200 RPM HDD 
  
  or
   
• 250GB Samsung 970 Evo
• 2TB 860 Evo, Crucial MX500, Adata SU800, Micron 1300

Great advise.

I was typing similar reply so I will make this shorter.

 

For OS, games, programs, things that need to load fast = SSD.

For data storage, archiving, music, movies = HDD. You can use SSD for this as well, HDDs usually have much greater capacity at same price.

 

I would go with 2 drives minimum, install OS and programs to the first. Second for your data, if you ever need to reinstall OS you have easier time as you can move stuff for the second drive.

[Pauleft]

I would personally go with a 1tb ssd and if you want more storage get hard drives and if you want to have windows separate just get a small ssd. 

 

Most ssds dropped in price/they are not that expensive anymore unlike 1-2 years ago