Options For Mega Storage For Everyday Use?

[An0maly_76]

My current build is awaiting the finishing touches (for now), should be able to fire it up in the next 2-3 days, hopefully. God, Amazon has me spoiled for this 2-day shipping thing. But I digress.

 

I've read a bit about RAID storage and such, but I'm not sure I fully understand it. From what I gather, it is an array of smaller drives addressed as one virtual drive, the reverse of partitioning a single physical drive to multiple smaller virtual drives. I also gather than it needs special hardware.

 

I have some health issues, including severe allergies and asthma (possibly COPD), as well as likely high-functioning autism known as Asperger's (awaiting testing). These health issues have worsened and regressed in recent years to where I am veritably homebound, and all  but bedridden. I am an avid movie and music buff, and have a possibly larger than average and steadily-growing collection of both. I'm not a bootlegger, though I do buy DVDs and rip or record them to PC storage so I can watch or listen without the hassle of searching for and loading a disc later. Backups for personal use, and it is perfectly legal to my knowledge. However, this does require a ton of storage and eats it up rather quickly -- the reason I chose a 6TB WD Black HDD for my current build and will likely be transferring my old rig's 2TB WD Blue HDD.

 

But today i started wondering, while it will take a bit for me to fill up a 6TB drive, it's not unheard of, and I don't like hunting through this drive or that drive to find this or that. Which is one of the issues with my current rig, as the 2 TB HDD was its original primary storage, and held more than the SSD that relegated it to secondary. So should I perhaps build a RAID array for my new build? Is it worth it? The new build hardware is an Asus Tuf B550 Plus with SATA3, PCIe-4 (likely slowed by the 3.2 Gen2 card installed), Corsair RM850x in a Corsair 4000X RGB case.

 

(Inside pics in this link)

Edited March 5, 2022 by An0maly_76
Revised

[Blue4130]

Not worth the hassle in your case (my opinion) just get a bigger drive. 

[wseaton]

RAID is for guarding against drive failure. In its simplest form RAID 1 is two drives mirrored, and in the event one drive fails you dont lose anything. You replace the bad drive and everything rebuilds. Its basically insurance.

 

HDs fail. SSDs fail. You can also buy two 6TB drives and just back up your stuff on a nightly basis to one drive.

 

 

[An0maly_76]

With the possible exception of a 2TB HDD that is currently auxiliary storage in my current rig, this build is all new, I'm just thinking in terms of simplifying my storage. Media takes up a lot of space quickly when sampled at a quality bitrate.