Game and Media Library Storage Problems - Would like a second opinion

[Master Sonic Wisebeard]

This is the situation

 

So in a simple sense, I have both not enough storage and lack of access to my storage

 

All of my tech is old and I have basically 0 funds to remedy any of my issues. The nice thing is I have a some old tech that isn’t being used

 

My set up

 

My PC has an 480Gb ocz Revo 3 x2 pcie SSD

This drive is my main and only drive at the moment

                This has been an issue because it suffers from performance slowdowns as it fills up

                Also the main problem is its not big enough for all my games. I have to pick and choose what games to have installed. I really hate that. Plus it’s a waste of time when you’ve got a buddy who you both own the same games but neither of you have the same ones installed at the moment.  And I’m always the one who has to download the new game because I pay for internet that doesn’t suck. Plus it wastes like 20 – 30 minutes getting it downloaded and started. I truly hate not having all my games available at once. I’m pretty A.D.D. about what I want to play and often I feel like playing something that I don’t have installed but say to heck with it because I don’t want to find a game to uninstall and then download the new one. I have a few games from Steam bundles that I have literally never played because of this.

 

My NAS is a 5 bay Drobo NAS box filled with 5 x 3TB Seagate barracuda drives

This is my bulk storage and currently holds my media library – Last estimate was around 7 or 8 TB

                It houses the only copy of my media. It runs in Drobo’s proprietary disk redundancy mode for up to 1 disk failure tolerance

                This things main problem is I can’t connect to it consistently. There are literally weeks at a time where it won’t show up on my network and then for a few weeks it will work just fine. The hot swap mix match drive size feature sounded sweet when I bought it but the lack of reliability in staying connected has freaked me out. Google searches has resulted in downloading the new dashboard software and a lot of posts about drobo’s breaking and holding people data hostage while drobo support attempts to help them a year or so later.

 

Attached to my PC is a 2 TB external drive Hard drive that has been acting as my storage volume for additions to my library. Normally I would dump this periodically to my Drobo NAS but since my Drobo has not always been showing up, I’ve kept all my additions on it. It’s approaching 1 TB  full now

 

This is the tech I have laying around

4 x 3TB WD Greens from an old 4 bay USB 2.0 box (don’t want us use the box. It’s so freaking slow at 20 MB/s MAX speeds lol)

1 x 3TB unknown drive from an old USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure. I think its WD but I’m not sure. It was a gift that I almost never used because of the USB 2.0 . I want to tear down the enclosure and salvage the drive from it

 

The problems

 

The Problems I’d like to solve are

1.)    have as many of my games installed on my PC as I can

2.)    Consolidate my library (would have to check but it’s probably 8-9TB with plans to grow)

3.)    Have access to my libraries at all times from my PC

4.)    Ideally have an actual back up of my library

 

Some other goals would be

1.)    Have games or my library not be super slow

2.)    Eventually set up a plex or other media serving system for my phone / Smart TV. It’s pretty hard to get this working when the Box the media is on is unavailable lol

 

The solutions

This is what I’m thinking of doing

 

For my pc and the game problem I’m thinking of taking the 3 TB salvage drive from my USB enclosure and dropping that in. Then I’m move all my steam and other games off my SSD to that HDD. I really don’t think I’d use more than 100 GB of the SSD for non-game data. It will suck for loading but there’s only so much you can do with no funds lol. And I think I will be happier with having all my games accessible anyways. I was also thinking of using either RAM cache or SSD cache to make this a bit faster. I do have the ram to spare (32GB) but it won’t give it a large cache and I’ve heard it a bit of screwing around to get it to work. I’m assuming it would be easier to just SSD cache it. I’m thinking partitioning my SSD and give the game HDD a 100 or 200 GB cache. I’ve never done this but from what I’ve read it will help.

 

For the library storage I was going to use the 4 x 3 TB WD Greens and putting them in my PC. Now originally I was going put them in raid 5. I’ve heard WD greens don’t work in Raid and sometimes it can just make the raid break. Something to do with variable speed RPM. I’ve also heard that it can work just fine. So not sure about all that. Problem is after thinking about it for a while I’m not 100% sure they would have enough capacity after formatting to actually store my library. Even if it could I’m pretty sure it would be like 99% full and I’d be back to using my 2TB external for additions. So now I’m thinking of just setting it up as JBOD. to my understanding there is no redundancy for this but I would be able to get almost all of the storage capacity out of my drives. I would then wait until my drobo felt like working and pull the entire thing to my PC’s new library storage and use that as the daily driver and leave a copy on the NAS. The NAs would still have the connection problems but then I would at least have a backup copy even If it was a problem to get to. I mean, that’s got to be better than nothing right? It would also give me a little bit of storage capacity to grow until I can purchase something that works better. I would also give this PC library a partition of my SSD for a cache. My experience though with JBOD is basically nothing. I don’t even know how to set it up yet lol.

 

You guys

 

What do you guys think? As far as I can tell this is the only way to accomplish what I want with the 0 funds I have. (literally zero, my fiancé lost her job because the business caught fire and the job market isn’t great at the moment)

 

And ideas of a better way to set this up or anything I may have overlooked?

 

I appreciate the assistance and thanks for reading

[Master Sonic Wisebeard]

I'm guessing that the no responses means this topic is super boring (which it kind of is for anyone not me lol) or that I didn't miss / overlook anything in my original post