Storage solution

[Kieker Jan]

So I haven't built a PC in oh about 25 years or so. As a Result I've been watching a lot of  YT to figure out whats changed.

spoiler, its a lot, but also very little.

Currently I'm looking at the storage solution. The problem is that I've never worked with sata or nvme. Other then whats presumably in my laptop and Xbox, and having never opened those up, that's a loose definition of work at best.

So I was hoping someone could follow my train of thought and see if it's sound please.

 

The plan is to build a multiple use case machine. So gaming, streaming, content creation and cad design with a light spot of 3d scan rendering

 

the current idea is

boot: 1TB nvme

storage: 2x 3TB Nas drives with dedicated 1 TB nvme scratch drive

games library, etc: 3TB 2,5'' sata (since Linus showed difference in speed had little effect on user experience, and on the presumption i'll be out of m.2 slots by then)

 

I went for 2x 1 tb nvme, because I dont know If nvme handles in anyway like ram and should be paired similarly? I don't think so, but..

Also because I've no idea what appropriate size for a boot drive is these days. Should I reduce it to 512? Instinctively I feel that's a minimum requirement, on the other hand I'm offloading a lot of tasks elsewhere, so maybe it is enough?

 

And lastly the plan involves B550. IF (big if with the price hike) I end up buying a gen4 nmve, wheres the best place to use it? As the boot or the scratch drive.

 

Thanks

[Anghammarad]

Just a hint for the NAS drives, those don't like powersaving or spindown/spinup cycles very much, due to their nature of being build for 24/7 use. 

 

If you aren't running your machine 24/7 you can use just normal WD Black, Seagate Barracuda and alikes. 

[Senzelian]

NVM-e drives don't have much in common with RAM. You should really treat them like any other SSD.

 

The size of the boot drive depends on what you define as a boot drive.
Some people like to put not only their OS, but also also almost everything else on it. If you just want to boot into Windows 10 from it and install commonly used software like browsers and such on it, then even 256GB is enough. I use currently 157GB of my 1TB drive.

 

You're not gaining much by the additional bandwith PCI-e Gen4 can provide for a boot drive. If you want to make use of the additional bandwith, then use that drive as a scratch drive. 

[Kieker Jan]

Ok thanks.

I'm not in the habit of shutting down my hardware, on the basis of cba with minutes loading. But that's obv. not gonna be an issue, so that's a good one to keep in mind.

 

Yeah, that was my guess, but like i said, never worked with SSD's. In my day you got to muck around with jumpers and where forced to partition drives if you wanted full use, you know ye good ol' days 

And since co-opting parts of architecture for different applications isn't exactly unheard of I thought I'd check.

 

Yeah I'm pretty lazy when it comes to file organisation myself, that why i'm trying to spread it all out a bit from the get go, before it becomes an utter mess. But cool i can downgrade that a bit if needed, tho I'm not sure if it worth the  $30 you save on 512MB

 

That was my thought, so no rules about having to use the fastest port as primary, like you should put your gpu in your fatest pci-e

check.

thanks for the help

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Storage Devices