Storage Question

[Sarge9272]

Hello everyone, I am building a new computer and need help figuring out what is the best option for storage without restoring to a NAS, my budget for storage is $300 (not including SSD's)

 

Single Western Digital Black 6 TB

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16822236970

or

Dual Western Digital Black 2 TB

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16822236624

 

Any feedback would be great!

[RadiatingLight]

if you are going for reliability, then the dual 2TB drives in RAID 1 will be much better than a single drive.

if you are going for capacity, then it's a pretty clear choice. 6tb > 4tb, and the 4tb is not reliable

 

what do you plan to do with the dual drives?

[Captain_WD]

9 hours ago, Sarge9272 said:

~snip~

Hi there

 

What are you going to do on that build? Are you planning on having a RAID array? Do you have a separate backup solution for your important data?

Having multiple drives instead of a single one can have its pros and cons. More drives always means more noise, vibrations and heat as well as less space in your case. Here it also means less overall storage space. On the other hand, having two separate storage drives means that if a drive fails you will lose only the data on that particular drive while the other drive will still hold your data safely while if you use a single storage drive with a higher capacity you will lose everything in case something happens with the drive (kinda like having all your eggs in a single basket).

 

More details would be useful in giving you further advice and better suggestions.

 

Captain_WD.  

[Sarge9272]

6 hours ago, Captain_WD said:

What are you going to do on that build? Are you planning on having a RAID array? Do you have a separate backup solution for your important data?

Well it will mainly be used for storage of movies, games, music. But I also do other things like editing, mixing and other projects as well. My current computer is pretty old i got it in 2008 and I have 2 seagate hard drives that to this day still work which kind of made me think "well maybe hard drives are reliable". As for RAID i personally never done it before but perhaps would do RAID 1 if i went with the dual drives. What i use currently as a backup is a 2TB WD Passport to keep copies of my important data. Also I just looked into their external drives and what do you think of perhaps just using the new My Book?

[Captain_WD]

14 hours ago, Sarge9272 said:

~snip~

Storing media and games doesn't require performance HDDs such as the WD Black drives. You may benefit from them when editing, though. 

 

You should be able to reuse your old drives as simple storage drives or backup drives and leave the WD Blacks as your main working drives. 

 

Mind that if you do plan on going for RAID one you should note a few things:

- it is highly recommended that you use drives that are rated for RAID usage (WD Blacks are), otherwise you are increasing the chance of a drive ropping out of the array and corrupting your data.

- RAID1 will give you the storage capacity of just one drive and will use the other for the redundancy, meaning if you use 2x2TB in RAID1 you will only have 2TB to use from that array.

- RAID is by no means a replacement for backups so I would simply suggest to keep storing backups on your external drives instead of relying on RAID redundancy. 

 

WD My Passport are great drives for storing secured backups. 

If you need more external storage space WD My Book are also a good option, featuring good capacities and the same hardware encryption as the WD My Passport. 

 

If you don't really need the hardware encryption you could instead take a look at WD Elements Desktop. 

 

Let me know if you need more info on any of these products! 

 

Captain_WD.