Large HDDs or SSDs?

Hi,

There is an ongoing thread about changing drive letters and a question was asked. I didn't want to post my question there in fear of hijacking it.

But what is the purpose of larger HDDs/SSDs?.

There are some members who have really large HDDs, 3-4tb or more, internal or external used primarily for storage but why?

Surely it's better to have a library of say 2TB external HDDs/SSD/s then cram everything on 1 unit and risk possibly loosing it all.

Thanks to the advise I had on these forums, I recently purchased for my Grandson a 4tb internal HDD so he can store his games on, it is what he wanted so didn't labor the point and he is delighted and I understand the need for such large capacities when storing games.

But for home use, storing films why do some buy huge HDDs and think it a good solution/idea for storage?

Jaylob4 said:

Hi,

But what is the purpose of larger HDDs/SSDs?...................Surely it's better to have a library of say 2TB external HDDs/SSD/s then cram everything on 1 unit and risk possibly loosing it all.

I'd think the best way to not "risk loosing it all" is to have more than 1 backup..................regardless of the size of the drives.

Let's say you have 20TB of movies to store. You can use 10 x 2TB drives to do it, but you run out of space, you generate lots of heat, you don't have enough SATA ports, etc.

Personally, I don't store movies, shows, etc. For me it's just digital pictures that I have taken and some office type docs, but those happen to fit on a 2TB drive with ease.

My son games a lot, he has 2 x 1TB NVMe drives in his computer for all his primary stuff. He added an 8TB HDD to hold stuff he isn't currently playing so that he doesn't have to redownload it later if he decides to play it.

My desktop has a single 2TB NVM'e and it holds everything I am currently doing, games, virtual machines and I just under 1TB used. I have an external 8TB drive that I use for backups.

pparks1 said:

Let's say you have 20TB of movies to store. You can use 10 x 2TB drives to do it, but you run out of space, you generate lots of heat, you don't have enough SATA ports, etc.

Personally, I don't store movies, shows, etc. For me it's just digital pictures that I have taken and some office type docs, but those happen to fit on a 2TB drive with ease.

My son games a lot, he has 2 x 1TB NVMe drives in his computer for all his primary stuff. He added an 8TB HDD to hold stuff he isn't currently playing so that he doesn't have to redownload it later if he decides to play it.

My desktop has a single 2TB NVM'e and it holds everything I am currently doing, games, virtual machines and I just under 1TB used. I have an external 8TB drive that I use for backups.

Hi there
I have loads of Music files and old TV series for example and simply store them on an aggregated RAID 0 system of 2 X RAID 0 arrays . Music etc doesn't change or get added to very often but it's nice to be able to have these essentially on what the OS sees as a "Single device".
Raid 0 is not without risks of course so I do have the folders backed up as well to external devices if the RAID 0 array fails (which it hasn't done - even though the NAS has run for years 24/7).



The great thing about Linux RAID 0 - software version - is that you can aggregate HDD's of different sizes to use all available HDD space giving you much better usage for data that actually doesn't change a lot e.g Music, Video etc.

The screenshot above shows 2 RAID 0 arrays of 10 and 11 TB (/dev/md126 and /dev/md127) aggregated HDD size. Speed is also great with RAID 0 but in my case it's being able to aggregate the data size availability rather than speed

Cheers
jimbo

The size of your storage drive depends on what you have to save. I have music, my photos and some films that fits on a 1TB HDD.
The most important is to have same size (or bigger) backup drive. I have an internal HDD with OS that I connect every Friday and mirror my data drive.

I have a small M.2 SSD (128G) and a first class 1T HDD. At the time I assembled this computer it was the cheapest option.
Today a first class 1T HDD cost almost the same as a 1T SSD.
Larger SSDs still cost much more than a equivalent first class HDD.

Megahertz said:

The size of your storage drive depends on what you have to save. I have music, my photos and some films that fits on a 1TB HDD.
The most important is to have same size (or bigger) backup drive. I have an internal HDD with OS that I connect every Friday and mirror my data drive.

I have a small M.2 SSD (128G) and a first class 1T HDD. At the time I assembled this computer it was the cheapest option.
Today a first class 1T HDD cost almost the same as a 1T SSD.
Larger SSDs still cost much more than a equivalent first class HDD.

Better and cheaper solution - as I posted above - use a load of cheaper HDD's for this and aggregate them in RAID 0 arrays. The speed will be great even for older HDD's and you can make the arrays as large as you like with different capacity HDD drives. Have backup though - although these days HDD's are very reliable so the likelyhood of your RAID 0 arrays failing is not very high. Not sure on Windows but software RAID (mdadm) works brilliantly on Linux type NAS systems.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

Better and cheaper solution - as I posted above - use a load of cheaper HDD's for this and aggregate them in RAID 0 arrays. The speed will be great even for older HDD's and you can make the arrays as large as you like with different capacity HDD drives. Have backup though - although these days HDD's are very reliable so the likelyhood of your RAID 0 arrays failing is not very high. Not sure on Windows but software RAID (mdadm) works brilliantly on Linux type NAS systems.

Cheers
jimbo

On my Sandy Bridge i7 computer I had a small 2.5" SSD and two 500G WD black HDD in BIOS RAID 0. It worked without any problems for years and one day I began to loose the array and had to recover from the single drive backup HDD.
On the third time it happened I gave up on RAID 0. For data, the speed of the drive isn't important as reliability.

Megahertz said:

On the third time it happened I gave up on RAID 0. For data, the speed of the drive isn't important as reliability.

Yeah, not a fan of RAID 0 here either. Only use it for scratch space. On a personal home computer setup, just give me an SSD or NVMe.

I'd be very apprehensive about having old drives hanging around too long in a RAID 0 array.

pparks1 said:

Yeah, not a fan of RAID 0 here either. Only use it for scratch space. On a personal home computer setup, just give me an SSD or NVMe.

I'd be very apprehensive about having old drives hanging around too long in a RAID 0 array.

Hi there
If you have decent old drives they can be very reliable -- especially if you use those intended for 24/7 operation such as drives designed to be used in continuous security recording mechanisms -- I haven't had a problem for years -- I store Music and video on these arrays (so there's not a huge amount of change) and have music and video libraries backed up externally too so no big deal if the online NAS were to fail. I Have around 5TB of Music on 2X HDD's in RAID 0 and similar for Video. My music is usually in FLAC or uncompressed format although when copying say to a phone or portable music player I can compress that to mp3 but always leave the original on the HDD.

The big thing in all this sort of stuff is to avoid the very cheap consumer products. I've found over the years (and not only with technology products) that buying quality products is pretty well always a winner -- I'm still using a pair of hand made walking shoes I bought when in England several years ago (Church's at around 800 EUR / USD !) -- they are magnificent compared to some of the poorly made vietnamese and chinese products that abound these days and will outlast the wearer I'm sure by several lifetimes !!!!!!..

As always of course its Risk to Reward ratio that counts !!!

Cheers
jimbo