Planning out expanding storage

[Conor Keating]

So while 3TB of storage is nothing to scoff at necessarily, I'm starting to feel a bit constrained by the storage space I currently have in my system, that being:

• A 1TB Gen4 Corsair MP600
• 2TB WD Black RE2
• 2 small SATA SSDs (previously functioned as boot drives for my FX-8350 and my old Eee 1018P)

I've got a Cooler Master HAF XB EVO, and while I love having the front drive sleds, I misinterpreted the spec sheet and thought I'd have more drive bays to work with inside the case. Knowing that I can only use the internal bays in either a 2x3.5" or 2x2.5"+1x3.5" (or possibly 4x2.5", though I don't think I have/recieved another bracket for that) configuration, which of those do people here think would work best for a workstation, and with what size drives? I also have another Gen3 NVMe slot on my motherboard that I can populate so as to have at a minimum 2 SSDs.

[MrSimplicity]

i mean honestly if you're using ssds and don't really see yourself hot swapping drives you can just load as many 2.5" ssds as you can in those front slots. you're really only limited to the amount of sata ports you have on your mobo.

[Conor Keating]

Well I intend to keep the front sleds open just in case I need to transfer data to/from other drives for file recovery among other things (sneakernet/station-wagon-full-of-tapes-hurtling-down-the-highway transfers, someday getting a proper NAS setup rather than my 1TB WD USB3 drive with the weirdo double wide micro-b connector hooked up to my Pi4). I don't exactly have money to burn so I'm not looking for the absolute most storage I could possibly fit in there/the fastest money could buy, just trying to figure out what would make sense as an upgrade path.

[MrSimplicity]

1 hour ago, Conor Keating said:

Well I intend to keep the front sleds open just in case I need to transfer data to/from other drives for file recovery and things like that.

so are you intending to use the expansion bays then? or are you already using those for cd drives and such?

[Conor Keating]

I will be populating the 5.25" bays too though they're currently empty. Gonna do a Blu-Ray burner and a card reader I think.

[MrSimplicity]

well im 100% not familiar with the case but if you have room anywhere to just stack them. You don't have to mount them especially if they're ssds.

[Conor Keating]

Yeah, now that you mention it I think there might be enough room to toss a couple SSDs in there and populate all of the SATA ports on my motherboard.

[MrSimplicity]

19 minutes ago, Conor Keating said:

Yeah, now that you mention it I think there might be enough room to toss a couple SSDs in there and populate all of the SATA ports on my motherboard.

I would personally mount 2 *high capacity* HDDs with hot swaps. then stash ssds and hide them somewhere.

 

*EDIT*