External Storage Help

Wolf10K · October 6, 2017

So its 2017 now and i want to move away from the old Mechanical HD in the System im planning on getting a 250 nvme to boot off of and 1 more sata SSD to pair with my current 250 one so i can raid those
but what i want to do with the hard drive get an enclosure with maybe 2-4 bays as storage with raid support so maybe i get a second 2tb HD and raid it with my current one
but I dont know where to start looking since almost every brand has a bad review but also a good one and im not looking to spend 200$ on the enclosure itself with things like the Pegasus3 running about 1500
thunderbolt 3 is a plus but usb 3.1 minimum for what i want

Tenadisic · October 6, 2017

if you want to stay super cheap you could pick up some usb to sata adapters and build your own enclosure

Oshino Shinobu · October 6, 2017

If you're getting NVMe purely in the hopes to boot faster, you'll be disappointed. NVMe is good for sequential read/writes, which is tasks such as copying large files or loading large files into RAM. They make very good scratch disks, but for booting, everyday use, gaming etc. they're not really any better than a regular SATA SSD.

Why are you wanting to RAID your SSDs? What kind of RAID? If you're planning on RAID 0, I would strongly advise against it as the real world benefits with SSDs are infrequent for most people and you basically double your chances of data loss on the SSDs. If you're planning RAID 1, I would get a backup solution beforehand if you haven't already. RAID 1 doesn't fully protect from data loss and corruption, just prevents downtime.

If you're using HDDs in the external box, USB 3.1 Gen1 (Same as USB 3.0 basically) is not going to be a bottleneck, so USB 3.1 Gen2 (I assume you mean Gen2 for the 10Gbps bandwidth) wouldn't really improve anything.

Still, going by what you want, there's a 2 bay USB 3.1 Gen2 enclosure that has good reviews on Amazon for $160 (TerraMaster D2-310). 4 bay units seem to all be over your budget.

I'll mention this again, but please don't use RAID 0 unless it's data you don't care about or unless you have a backup solution in place already. I'd also advise against RAID in general if you don't have a suitable backup solution in place as a backup is a better and more worthwhile spend of your money than RAID.

Wolf10K · October 8, 2017

On 10/6/2017 at 2:11 PM, Oshino Shinobu said:

If you're getting NVMe purely in the hopes to boot faster, you'll be disappointed. NVMe is good for sequential read/writes, which is tasks such as copying large files or loading large files into RAM. They make very good scratch disks, but for booting, everyday use, gaming etc. they're not really any better than a regular SATA SSD.

Why are you wanting to RAID your SSDs? What kind of RAID? If you're planning on RAID 0, I would strongly advise against it as the real world benefits with SSDs are infrequent for most people and you basically double your chances of data loss on the SSDs. If you're planning RAID 1, I would get a backup solution beforehand if you haven't already. RAID 1 doesn't fully protect from data loss and corruption, just prevents downtime.

If you're using HDDs in the external box, USB 3.1 Gen1 (Same as USB 3.0 basically) is not going to be a bottleneck, so USB 3.1 Gen2 (I assume you mean Gen2 for the 10Gbps bandwidth) wouldn't really improve anything.

Still, going by what you want, there's a 2 bay USB 3.1 Gen2 enclosure that has good reviews on Amazon for $160 (TerraMaster D2-310). 4 bay units seem to all be over your budget.

I'll mention this again, but please don't use RAID 0 unless it's data you don't care about or unless you have a backup solution in place already. I'd also advise against RAID in general if you don't have a suitable backup solution in place as a backup is a better and more worthwhile spend of your money than RAID.

Thanks for the detailed info its really helpful and i will definitely check out that enclosure
for clarifications sake
neither my NVME nor my SSD will handle any precious data just gunna fill with games and such,so ill probably Raid 0 the two SSDs.
that's why I want to get an enclosure for the HDD to keep all my "stuff" in there and get that "contraption" out of my build
I have a second HDD just laying around although a sata 2 its still a 1TB that I hook up every now and then, to update or whatever, as a last resort backup
and even after all that my laptop has copies of everything that super important important as well

thats just for my stuff right now and im not even clearing 1 TB with my games loaded
as soon as i move my HDD im gunna move all my family photos and old home videos and music onto that drive as a backup for the whole house

even if it is maybe only gunna squeeze me 1-3 second faster load times in anything, I wanna do it for the hell of it.
like i dont need to do a custom loop in the spring but im probably gunna do it
and bring alittle bit of the Computer porn linus spews onto his channel to life