Which drives for each system

[chefmagnus]

Hi there, 

I am trying to decide what would be he best storage solution for my new and old system. The old system will become my family's NAS and game computer. The older system is a i7:4770K on a Asus Max. VII Formula with 32 GB of Corsair Dom RAM(4×8GB) with a GTX970 .  I have a new i7:6700K Asus WS z170 with 32GB of G.Skill RAM(2×16GB)with 2×GTX980Ti in SLI that has a Samsung 950 PRO 512GB M.2 SSD mounted on it.(I hope to add a second Samsung 950 PRO 512 GB M.2 drive and have a  RAID 0 (4for my OS in the future.) The old system has a Corsair H110 AiO . The new system is cooled by a expanded Swiftech H320x² Prestige AiO. I added EK-Waterblocks to 2×GTX980Ti in SLI and a 480mm radiator and a 

 

I would like to divide up the old storage from the old system. It is a mix of 3 SSDs and 4 HDDs. The first SSD that I have is the 512 GB M.2 that can only can go in the new system. I have my OS on this Samsung 950PRO SSD that is mounted in the new system. In addition there are three standard SSDs, a Samsung 512GB 850 EVO SSD, a Kingston HyperX 120GB drive, and a 60GB Mushkin Chronos Deluxe SSD.  I have my old system OS on the Samsung 850EVO but I am thinking of moving the OS to the 120GB Kingston Hyper X SSD if I put the Samsung 850EVO in the new system.

 

The old system has 4 mechanical drives. They are in two groups in my mind. The old system has a fast and safe RAID 5 array(three(3×) 2 TB(1810GB) WD Black 7200 rpm drives in one array of 3620 GB with 2× Read/No Write speed gain 1-drive failure protection) of  and a 4 TB(3725 GB) WD Blue 5400 rpm drive that is much slower than the RAID 5 array. These are my 4 mechanical and 3 solid state drives that used up almost all of the SATA connections of my old system motherboard. I do photo, audio, and video editing so I need a fast but reliable storage. 

 

 How would you divide them between the two systems? What would you move to the new system and what would you leave in the old system. We use the old system now for video and photo sharing. I am not a computer expert by career so your help would be great. 

 

Chef

[Captain_WD]

2 hours ago, chefmagnus said:

~snip~

 

Hey there chefmagnus

 

It would really depend on what you will be doing on each system with each drive and what are your requirements and demands. SSDs generally provide much faster access times and transfer speeds, but you should also have in mind that not all types of usage benefit from a SSD's speed. Usages such as simple office work, gaming, playing media, etc. don't benefit at all besides the initial loading times. In games you won't notice any change in FPS or graphics if you compare running it off a SSD and off a HDD. 

 

I would still recommend having your OSs of both systems on a SSD for much better boot/loading times and responsiveness and distribute the HDDs between the systems according to the usage and storage space demands. 

 

One work about RAID - it is a good idea to have redundancy on systems that hold valuable data (such as a NAS) but RAID should never be considered a backup if it hold the only copy of your data. Another thing would be the drives that you are using. Not all drives are designed to work on RAID arrays and even though they will (as there's no restriction to what drives would work in the array) it won't be as safe and as secure for your data nor it will be a stable RAID array.

 

Another thing you could do is check the health of all drives (including the raw values of the S.M.A.R.T. statuses) with tools from the manufacturers and make sure they are at top health before trusting your data to them as potential problems with the drive might lead to permanent data loss down the road.

 

Feel free to ask if there are any specific questions! 

 

Captain_WD.