Very Large HDD or Larger SSD for Secondary Storage

The Ginger Ninja · December 18, 2018

Good day!

I wanted to see if I could get some help regarding my storage situation. I broke it up into sections so you can read everything or you can skip to the main question if you'd like!

CURRENT COMPUTER CONFIG:
NZXT H200i Mini-ITX Case
Asus ROG Strix Z370-I Gaming Motherboard

Intel Core i7-8700k
G.Skill TridentZ 16GB (2x8GB) 3000 MHz RGB RAM
EVGA nVidia Geforce GTX 1070 SC
Other stuff that doesn't matter performance-wise

BACKGROUND: I have a mini-ITX case that only has three 2.5-inch drive caddies (I took two of them out for more room for my custom water loop -- space is a premium at the moment!) and two M.2 headers. Ever since I built it, I decided on one 500GB Samsung 850 Evo as my only storage as a happy medium between space and speed until I had enough money to upgrade to an NVMe SSD, using the 850 Evo as just high-speed storage. This, as you could imagine, limits what I can put on my computer at one time. Well, in a very fortunate series of events, I now have a 512GB Samsung PM961 and a 512GB Samsung PM981 occupying my two M.2 slots and about $70 saved up in my "Future Computer Upgrades" (FCU) savings account. This means that my current storage situation is now 1TB NVMe SSD storage and 500GB SATA SSD storage.

QUESTION: I am looking at the possibility of selling my 850 Evo and using the total money from my FCU account and that sale to purchase a larger capacity storage device. I am looking at either getting a 1TB 2.5-inch SATA SSD to give myself 2TB of all high-speed storage, getting a 4TB 2.5-inch 5400RPM Seagate Barracuda for 1TB ultra-fast storage and a lot of slow storage, or getting a 2TB Seagate FireCuda SSHD for 1TB ultra-fast storage and 2TB slower (but not too bad) storage.

Thoughts? I mostly game but I do some photo editing and am learning to edit videos (both via Adobe; I don't know if that affects anything). I've been keeping a lot of stuff in cloud storage so that I didn't take up too much space before on my computer.

MY CURRENT OPINION: I am currently leaning towards either the FireCuda or the Baracuda just so that way I "future-proof" my storage capacity as much as possible, with more of an emphasis on the FireCuda so that I at least have an optane-like storage solution (I don't have any more open M.2 slots on my motherboard for actual Optane modules). However, if the slower drives will be a major drawback in speeds, I think I will lean towards the 1TB SSD so that I still have a decent amount of storage, but I won't really have to worry about speed, then.

Radium_Angel · December 18, 2018

6 minutes ago, The Ginger Ninja said:

speed

Here's the rub then...

on a traditional spinner, if it dies you can get your data back (most of the time)

on a SSD, you can't.

So the question you have to ask yourself is this: How current are your backups? If it's realtime, then when the SSD goes south you haven't lost anything. If you have to think about your backup plan and when the last time it ran, well....

Mira Yurizaki · December 18, 2018

As a tidbit, SSHDs work best if you have frequently accessed data. So they're more suited for running applications from rather than media storage.

I'd say the 4TB HDD + 1TB SSD option is best. Despite what people may think about 5400 RPM drives, they do have a respectable amount of bandwidth. In an ideal case, my 4TB WD Green can maintain about 130-150 MB/sec.

seagate_surfer · December 18, 2018

This seems to be the way to go. An SSD for the operating system and the applications that are accessed most often, such as the web browser and some games where appropriate, and the rest goes to the hard drive... But as prices are dropping in SSDs, some experts believe that SSDs will go down to the same prices as an HDD and then there will be no reason not to buy one.

The Ginger Ninja · December 19, 2018

Thanks, everyone! I'm currently selling my SSD so that I have the money to be able to snag a large HDD! Unfortunately, I just learned my case can't handle the 4TB version of the 2.5-inch BarraCuda drives because my only open caddy can't handle drives 15mm tall. But, I'm either going to snag the 2TB FireCuda SSHD and use that as my game/music/movie storage mainly for games that I don't play as much currently, or the 2TB BarraCuda HDD since they are both within ~$10 of each other and 7mm tall.