which 4 (or 2) HDDs?

[jamtechaus]

So I've been doing research on which models are 7200 RPM, which models are CMR not SMR, and my previous system was 4tb not good enough, so 6tb+ is what I need.

I hate how the prices are just insane these days, the Australian dollar is so weak. And there are no good deals. Probably these are less than half the price in the USA, I wish that I lived in the USA.

 

 

 

Probably no one cares, but my old PC was for gaming and a little bit of media archiving. intel 2011-3 with (at the time) massive 16gb DDR4 RAM, and 4tb hdd. But then I got into godot game development, and now I have moved on from scripting to c++, now I am starting with UE5. I've found out through pain that I need a new PC with MUCH more RAM, compiling UE5 with LTCG is just insane. And storage requirements for media assets and temporary files, massive. I'm thinking of repurposing my old 1tb SSD just as a cache drive. I do my own 7z backups. I backup to external usb HDD. Currently I just have it 7zip a full copy that overwrites the previous and let it run for as long as it needs to, and I have 3x USB hdd that I cycle round-robin, and run this backup like every few days or twice a week or so. I just when I am about to make a big change like upgrade to a new build version of the editor and I haven't backed up the project in a while. But I also want RAID-0 mirroring for faster read and drive fail safety. I hate how bad VirtualBox and VmWare work these days. I remember VmWare workstation being fantastic about 10 years ago but now everything is laggy and buggy and VMs keep breaking and not booting anymore, I think that windows updates keep killing VMs even though I always disable HyperV. I am sick of running linux in VMs I need a real linux install again, time to get series. I want to share the same CPU and RAM though because I am buying that ADATA 2x48GB DDR5 kit for 96GB of RAM for compiling all this stuff really well.

I think I want dual boot between Ubuntu Linux and Windows 10 using separate hard drives for each OS. I also think I want raid-1 because I'd feel safer that way. Linux software raid, and Windows device management raid (rather than intel rapidstore / AMD raid).

But out of the ones that they sell here it is ironwolf that is CMR and 7200RPM:
A) Would you just buy 4 of those iron wolfs now? And RAID-1(Ironwolf,Ironwolf) and hope they don't both die the same week?
B) Or buy 2 now and mark on my calendar to buy another 2 for next year (so that they are from different batches and not likely to die at the same time)?
C) Or buy 2x iron wolfs and 2x WD blacks which sadly are the only WD I could find that are 7200RPM, 8tb, and not SMR?

that way the RAID-1 pairs are pairWindows=RAID1(Seagate,WD), pairLinux=RAID1(Seagate,WD) and probably Seagate and WD will fail in different years so no interruption and better peace of mind. Is my current idea. And why are WD Black soo expensive? I'm thinking that 4x IronWolf will be fine, and save me $240 which will let me buy a new pair of shoes. Or is that too risky? I've had bad experience with seagate in the past but that was years and years ago so I hope they've improved.

 

I actually originally was going to go with 6tb SSDs but no, the price is just too much. What would you do in this situation? Just buy all the HDDs you think you'll need straight up on credit card interest free and then just pay them off, or space the purchases out? I'm going to reuse my old GFX card to save money and also to help keep graphics design modest and compatible with older systems.

[Shimejii]

This makes 0 sense to do at those prices honestly. 8 TB for 270$ or 390$? Thats pretty abysmal pricing for a HDD nowadays.

[jamtechaus]

I feel that you're right. Maybe I can temporarily repurpose my existing 4tb and copy everything off them onto external drives and wait until I can buy bigger drive at a reasonable price maybe in a few years time they will come down to more reasonable levels here. I was thinking, I could buy two small SSD boot drives one for linux one for windows, and then share the same HDD for the media assets, because linux can read NTFS partitions used by windows, and 99% of the data is compatible between both OS just some small .dll and .so files and maybe DX12/GLSL shaders are different, the real large files are the same.