PC Build Planning - Configuration Planning Assistance

[Aereto_Compuru]

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday approaching in a week or two, I have been juggling my research, homework, and a part time job. I happen to come across some design plan that will need some feedback before finalizing the plan. Not going to reference from my other threads, since it's focused solely on storage solutions.

 

Spoiler

PC Build Plan Notes:

• Gaming and Development PC with more than one user account, in addition to virtualization or having a separate OS on a different drive to boot from.
• One NVIDIA gaming card and one AMD workstation card to have enough performance to handle unstable and poorly optimized builds, while having the capacity and affordability to perform rendering, editing, modeling, artwork, and potential CAD-related things and double-precision calculation in the future.
• 1,000 - 1,500 USD budget line, killing NVIDIA Titan's chance of being in this PC or any 1080s and Quadros
• Cannot salvage pre-built PCs found at home due to significant age differences (10+ years and ~5 years) and performance that will not withstand the demands of the purpose.
• Data storage likely to be highly structured and planned for the sake of damage control.
• Air-cooling only, taking advantage of seasonal climates.

 

As a note, I already purchased the motherboard. which has 2 M.2 slots with their own bandwidth, so no slot in the board will be chocked or disabled. A H170 is used, as I am a first time builder, and I am taking this as a learning and practicing experience while meeting my needs. I'll have to wait until the i7 6700 has dropped significantly, likely at Black Friday. I'll get a separate backup drive that is greater than the combined size at a different time.

 

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Proposed systems (case proposed is Corsair Carbide 600C, 2 3.5", 3 2.5"):

 

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1 M.2 NVMe (128 - 256 GB) - Windows OS and main/high value application drive (Windows OS will be school-provided as long as I attend classes)

1 SATA SSD (256 - 512 GB) - Program/application and cache drive, with or without separate partition for Linux for experimentation purposes. (Linux virtualization preferred for sandbox containment)

2 3.5" HDDs (2 - 5 TB) - Mass storage in RAID 1 via motherboard, must be able to survive drive replacement process.

 

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2 M.2 NVMe (128 - 256 GB) - Windows OS/Linux and program drives, not in RAID

2 3.5" HDDs (2 - 5 TB) - Mass storage in RAID 1 via motherboard, must be able to survive drive replacement process.

 

As far as I checked into the forums, NAS drives may be good for RAID 1 due to their intended purpose in an environment of redundant data. Then there are the brands and their HDDs:

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Seagate - As far as I researched, their drive reliability has been questionable, especially the Barracuda series. Backblaze cloud backup services are not helping with their situation due to their higher reported annual failure rate than Western Digital

 

Western Digital - Their drives seem to be somewhat reliable in addition to low cost for their lower end HDDs, so I have been considering to use WD Black 2TB for their design purpose and warranty

 

HGST - Known as Hitachi, their drives are as reliable as HDDs can get, though their prices have left me wondering about the benefit weighing it.

 

Toshiba - I've had some external drives of those, and that have been reliable as backup and secondary storage so far.

I would appreciate some input on which brand I should look into again and what kind of drive should I use with the design purpose and expectations. Large capacity HDD in motherboard's RAID 1, subjected to storing save data ranging from text documents, to models, to textures/art, to audio/video files including editing, to game save files, as far as game development.

[Captain_WD]

13 hours ago, Aereto_Compuru said:

~snip~

Hi

 

This surely sounds like an interesting build plan and it looks like a powerful system coming to life. 

 

I am not sure how storage-demanding will your workloads be, but a SSD for the OS and the work applications is a great idea. You have to decide if there's a point to get a NVMe SSD or a SATA SSD can do the job. 

 

Mind that gaming doesn't really rely on the storage for anything else but the loading times. Only open world or MMO games may have their surrounding textures load faster but again that won't affect their quality nor the overall FPS. 

 

For the RAID1 array, mind that RAID is by no means a replacement for a backup so I would strongly recommend having a separate external storage drive to keep copies of your data. 

WD Black and WD Blue drives are both rated safe for using in consumer RAID applications. You should be safe using either of them in a basic RAID1 array with two drives.

Also, you could check out WD Red as these are dedicated NAS/RAID drives which are designed specifically for this purpose. 

 

Let me know if you need more info

 

Captain_WD.

[Aereto_Compuru]

12 hours ago, wrathoftheturkey said:

Blacks are imo overpriced, a WD Red should be good (they're designed to work well with RAID too just a slightly shorter warranty and barely noticeable performance difference)

Fair enough, considering that WD Red and other NAS drives are designed for systems with RAID settings. I do happen to notice the additional caution regarding the use of Blue or other simple PC HDDs in regards to replacing HDDs and recovery, lacking the infrastructure necessary for appropriate response to such situations.

 

Of course, the NAS drives would be inside the desktop, and I doubt I would be building a NAS system to back all of the computer data, including our laptops.

[Aereto_Compuru]

21 minutes ago, Captain_WD said:

Spoiler

 

Hi

 

This surely sounds like an interesting build plan and it looks like a powerful system coming to life. 

 

I am not sure how storage-demanding will your workloads be, but a SSD for the OS and the work applications is a great idea. You have to decide if there's a point to get a NVMe SSD or a SATA SSD can do the job. 

 

Mind that gaming doesn't really rely on the storage for anything else but the loading times. Only open world or MMO games may have their surrounding textures load faster but again that won't affect their quality nor the overall FPS. 

 

For the RAID1 array, mind that RAID is by no means a replacement for a backup so I would strongly recommend having a separate external storage drive to keep copies of your data. 

WD Black and WD Blue drives are both rated safe for using in consumer RAID applications. You should be safe using either of them in a basic RAID1 array with two drives.

Also, you could check out WD Red as these are dedicated NAS/RAID drives which are designed specifically for this purpose. 

 

Let me know if you need more info

 

Captain_WD.

 

 

 

I do happen to have external drives that act as backup, but I need to take my entire desktop's total storage into account first before getting one in the future (I have one with 3TB, but it's full of laptop backups and offsite storage). I am planning to have a workstation GPU, UPS, external drive, mouse, and silent mechanical keyboard with RGB lighting (likely Razer Blackwidow Chroma due to having an API for developers who want applications to interface with the lighting) for long-term expansion.

 

I notice that gaming doesn't need that strong of a CPU, though the nature of my intended design pushes it to an Intel non-K i7. I don't overclock and prefer reliability and reasonable power draw capped at 650W.

 

I am expecting to start small, since I plan to develop and design on my own as a hobby, but scaling is a possibility. I am placing 2TB as a minimum, considering that our laptops are 500GB. I do have a budget, however, despite that Black Friday / Cyber Monday would help reduce purchase costs.

 

As a bit of extra info, I am currently a student studying in the field of Information Systems/ Information Technology. Working knowledge helps with my PC build and control planning.

[Captain_WD]

19 hours ago, Aereto_Compuru said:

~snip~

As I pointed out, using either WD Blue, WD Black or WD Red would all work for basic storage in a RAID1 configuration. 

 

As for the RAID1 option, If one of the drives fails you should still be able to access your data, but it is recommended to replace the failed drive so the RAID can rebuild itself. If a drive fails you won't be able to get the other drive to a different port or a different computer to get your data. Simply put: you are stuck using that drive solely on that system and on that SATA port. It does, however, provide with instant copying of the data on the other drive and you won't have to use any software or wait for a backup to complete to have your data secure. In case you are doing something important and something happens to your drive, with a simple backup to another drive you will have all the information up to the point of the last backup. All changes and new data from that point to the point of failure will be lost. You can use a backup application to move the data to the other drive in the system and thus be able to swap PCs and ports, but mind that if you use a backup application to another drive in the same system this won't be a true backup as you are still prone to system failure, power outage, malware attacks and other factors that could damage your data regardless of your copies.  

 

I'd say you should simply stick with backing up your most important data to external drives.

 

Captain_WD.

[Aereto_Compuru]

9 hours ago, Captain_WD said:

As I pointed out, using either WD Blue, WD Black or WD Red would all work for basic storage in a RAID1 configuration. 

 

As for the RAID1 option, If one of the drives fails you should still be able to access your data, but it is recommended to replace the failed drive so the RAID can rebuild itself. If a drive fails you won't be able to get the other drive to a different port or a different computer to get your data. Simply put: you are stuck using that drive solely on that system and on that SATA port. It does, however, provide with instant copying of the data on the other drive and you won't have to use any software or wait for a backup to complete to have your data secure. In case you are doing something important and something happens to your drive, with a simple backup to another drive you will have all the information up to the point of the last backup. All changes and new data from that point to the point of failure will be lost. You can use a backup application to move the data to the other drive in the system and thus be able to swap PCs and ports, but mind that if you use a backup application to another drive in the same system this won't be a true backup as you are still prone to system failure, power outage, malware attacks and other factors that could damage your data regardless of your copies.  

 

I'd say you should simply stick with backing up your most important data to external drives.

 

Captain_WD.

I am taking RAID 1, so I do not mind doubling the drive cost for the same capacity as long as it best fulfills data integrity needs.

 

Having a backup and mirrored storage is the best configuration my budget can allow.

 

I have two options for the case between Corsair Carbide 600C (2 5.25", 2 3.5", 3 2.5", 2 x 140 mm front) and NZXT 630 Window (2 5.25, 8 3.5"/2.5", 2 x 200mm front), which I will take based on availability and price balancing.

[Captain_WD]

On 18.11.2016 г. at 8:06 PM, Aereto_Compuru said:

~snip~

Do share once you are done with the build so we can check it out and enjoy it. 

 

Make sure your case has enough space for adequate airflow so you can get proper cooling on your parts. 

 

Captain_WD.