a strange build

[NetherRealm]

Ok, I should start off by saying that I have a good chunk of my build pretty much completed, but I am having issues planning for some expected changes in the future...

 

So here's my situation, I absolutely love having a ton of storage, I keep backups of everything; I do mean everything, backups from Android, PC (Windows 10), and various other devices running various operating systems.

 

I currently have about 7.5 TB of storage readily available in connected and OPERATING as in powered on storage not accounting for storage overhead or formatting overhead. I have so much storage that I have a tough time keeping all my stuff together and I have no idea how much storage I am currently using, but I expect it to be in the range of terabytes of total storage...

 

Furthermore with my build I want to be able to switch between 2 OS installations, Windows 10, and Ubuntu (16.04.5/whatever the latest 16.04.X is), however, I want to be able to keep some storage devices inaccessible to BOTH of the OS installations... Here's the kicker: I tend to mess up my Ubuntu installations a lot; for instance, I will try to modify pretty much anything and end up rebooting for some changes to take effect, and I will end up getting stuck in an EFI shell with no way to boot into anything to try to fix my mistake. This has also happened to me while using a windows installation...

I also want to be able to dual boot through the Windows dual boot menu since it looks a lot nicer.

 

I am not even done with my many trials and tribulations, but I just don't know what I need to do or how to actually achieve my end goal.

 

I just felt I needed to put this out there to see if anyone has any advice, or if anyone is an expert on such odd configs and can help me figure out why I am such a dunce that I can't figure out why I can't even configure a simple dual boot system without it all falling apart like my life after my parents divorce?

 

 

Sorry; and I hope this is the right forum topic as I feel my issue is mostly about storage devices...

[Slayer3032]

I built a home server out of spare parts since I ran out of space for disks in my Corsair 450D and didn't really want to add more and more drives into it with my slow Sata 2 since the Sata 3 on my board isn't part of the chipset and the controller is known to be awful. It's primarily used as a Plex server and NAS but also runs an assortment of other things too.

 

If you're serious about backups and storage, you're probably going to want some redundancy and most newer cases aren't really that friendly to build a stack of disks. Having all of the sata controllers on and 5 drives connected nearly doubled my boot times, but I use an old non-UEFI X58 platform so these are problems I cause for myself. I even install steam games to the network drive and just move them between libraries to my 1TB NVMe across the network. It's just a hair slower than my slowest disk so losing like 30-40MB/s from the fastest isn't a big deal to me across gigabit lan.