Jedi2155 Posted October 13, 2008 Report Share Posted October 13, 2008 This thread is for dicussion and advice of your storage configurations.....here's my issue. Currently I have the following: 160 GB Raptor - All OS + Installed Games + Programs + Documents (5-15 GB Free constantly changing) 500 GB - Media + Music + Pictures ( 80 GB Free) 300 GB - ISO's + Program Installers + Drivers + Reformat Stuff (103 GB Free) 160 GB - P2P Downloads + Temp Directory (91 GB Free) I'm really hitting the space limits of my 160 GB Raptor....I'm considering the following: Option 1: Selling my raptor and going with a 300 GB Velociraptor which should "mostly" but not fully satisfy my storage requirements for another year or so... Expected Cost: $260 - $120 from my old drive -----> $140 Option 2: Redo my storage into: OS Drive: 160 GB Raptor as previous BUT games will be installed onto another drive partition. A new 1 or 1.5 TB HDD partitioned into the following 1.5 TB ~ 500 GB for more Games Installed ~ 860 GB - Remaining to replace Media Storage Duties from the 500 GB 1 TB ~ 200 GB for more Games ~ 700 GB for Media Duties 500 GB to combine the duties of the 160 & 300 GB Drives 300 GB drive to go into a external enclosure for my PS3 Sell the 160 GB drive or use it as a backup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kuhla Posted October 13, 2008 Report Share Posted October 13, 2008 Having a 10k RPM drive is a requirment for your primary drive? Something like a WD6400AAKS would be too slow? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ren Posted October 13, 2008 Report Share Posted October 13, 2008 I'm always for the bang/buck economical route: get a fast drive with lots of storage space at a competetive $dollar/gb ratio. wd6400aaks was my first pick for a long time but now im looking at the (cheap and fast) 1/1.5tb drives. because imo in the end, having that extra 600-1000gb of hard drive space is usually much more useful than having that little extra read/write performance in actual usage. benchmarking is another matter though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kuhla Posted October 13, 2008 Report Share Posted October 13, 2008 I'm always for the bang/buck economical route: get a fast drive with lots of storage space at a competetive $dollar/gb ratio. wd6400aaks was my first pick for a long time but now im looking at the (cheap and fast) 1/1.5tb drives. because imo in the end, having that extra 600-1000gb of hard drive space is usually much more useful than having that little extra read/write performance in actual usage. benchmarking is another matter though. For a storage drive, yea, I would want the same: bang/buck/big drive. For my primary drive though, I don't like to have such a big drive. I've rarely maxed out 150GB of a primary drive/partition. In my perfect world, I would have like a ~300GB primary drive. At that size a low level reformat, defrag, etc. are relatively quick jobs. I also prefer to have a whole drive dedicated to the task, not a partition. That pretty much stands for storage drive too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ren Posted October 13, 2008 Report Share Posted October 13, 2008 For a storage drive, yea, I would want the same: bang/buck/big drive. For my primary drive though, I don't like to have such a big drive. I've rarely maxed out 150GB of a primary drive/partition. In my perfect world, I would have like a ~300GB primary drive. At that size a low level reformat, defrag, etc. are relatively quick jobs. I also prefer to have a whole drive dedicated to the task, not a partition. That pretty much stands for storage drive too. to be honest, I would too; but when you look at the price/gb on smaller drives there is no incentive to buy anything smaller than a 500gb drive unless you are looking for a specific factor such as having a velociraptor. at this point you're actually paying significantly more price/gb just to have a small primary drive as opposed to a larger one and I just don't see the pros for the smaller drives being worth the extra cost for what you're getting. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kuhla Posted October 13, 2008 Report Share Posted October 13, 2008 to be honest, I would too; but when you look at the price/gb on smaller drives there is no incentive to buy anything smaller than a 500gb drive unless you are looking for a specific factor such as having a velociraptor. at this point you're actually paying significantly more price/gb just to have a small primary drive as opposed to a larger one and I just don't see the pros for the smaller drives being worth the extra cost for what you're getting. Yea I understand that which is why I would probably choose a WD6400AAKS for my primary drive at 640GB which still gives pretty good value for it's "smaller" size. It is only $75 on newegg which comes out to $0.12 per GB. The other problem with going under 500GB is that a lot of companies are now treating that segment as low end user so there are no performance options (except for raptor obviously) in that size range. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi2155 Posted October 14, 2008 Author Report Share Posted October 14, 2008 The problem with me, is that I have 4 hard drives right now, and I need greater storage density. I don't want to buy 2 more hard drives, as getting a 640 GB AAKS would require me to have two more drives and still not be very dense. I'm planning to move to a 3 drive setup preferably. Optimal setup for me would be the following 1x 300 GB Velociraptor + 1x 1.5 TB + 1x 500 GB Basically the 640 GB drive is out the question mainly due to the fact that its a single primary drive that is not large enough to be partitioned into usable sizes, and I do not have to move my other content onto a smaller partition. Although I do need to give this more thought....i'll wait till Black Friday and see what sizes are on sale . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ne0nimda Posted October 15, 2008 Report Share Posted October 15, 2008 Have you tried playing with mount points? You can probably help move some more data off of your primary hard disk that way. Calling your original hard drives "1-4" The following looks like a reasonable layout to me: 1 - C:\ 2 - C:\Users\Jedi\ 3 - C:\Users\Jedi\Backups\ 4 - C:\Users\Jedi\AppData\Local\Temp\ (or if you want a directory that's not hidden by default, C:\Users\Jedi\Temp\ ) This will save room in your first partition by 1. Moving all your documents to disk 2 (I assume you don't benchmark your Word write-to-disk speeds...) 2. Moving all those systems settings files that pertain to your user account to more appropriate disks (i.e. prefs are automatically on a more stable partition & temp files go to disk 4 if you use the first junction point) Setting your user directory as a junction point will require a bit of voodoo, but IIRC, it's as simple as backing up the contents of C:\Users\Jedi to disk 2's root, deleting C:\Users\Jedi\, and (before logging out/in) setting the junction. --Obligatory Waiver-- I could always forget some minor technical detail and sh*t always happens. Make sure you've backed up your data before you try to screw with your user profile directory... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi2155 Posted October 15, 2008 Author Report Share Posted October 15, 2008 Have you tried playing with mount points? You can probably help move some more data off of your primary hard disk that way. Calling your original hard drives "1-4" The following looks like a reasonable layout to me: 1 - C:\ 2 - C:\Users\Jedi\ 3 - C:\Users\Jedi\Backups\ 4 - C:\Users\Jedi\AppData\Local\Temp\ (or if you want a directory that's not hidden by default, C:\Users\Jedi\Temp\ ) This will save room in your first partition by 1. Moving all your documents to disk 2 (I assume you don't benchmark your Word write-to-disk speeds...) 2. Moving all those systems settings files that pertain to your user account to more appropriate disks (i.e. prefs are automatically on a more stable partition & temp files go to disk 4 if you use the first junction point) Setting your user directory as a junction point will require a bit of voodoo, but IIRC, it's as simple as backing up the contents of C:\Users\Jedi to disk 2's root, deleting C:\Users\Jedi\, and (before logging out/in) setting the junction. --Obligatory Waiver-- I could always forget some minor technical detail and sh*t always happens. Make sure you've backed up your data before you try to screw with your user profile directory... 1. I use to do that...then I realized I open up my documents almost as much as Firefox. I actually use my computer for work and use office regularly. Games I can offload because they're huge and I rarely play them. 2. I actually am doing that right now however some things like like FREAKING CREATIVE DRIVERS like to screw up EVERY single install because it stores its setup files in the proper location with the environmental variables but the actual installation refers to C:\Windows\Temp causing to fail miserably for a long arse time.... I currently have my TMP/TEMP variables set to a directory on one of my spare drives. All my pictures/videos are stored on another drive, and my documents are used quite frequently and where the speed of my raptors helps the most (lots of random accesses). I haven't considered moving the user profiles directory but that follows the same logic as the My Documents folder as the user profile consists of the desktop (not to mention the size of the My Documents folder is relatively small) along with the user profile. A better alternative would be to shut off volume shadow copy and system restore but I actually use those.....I set my current size to around 10 GB which is good for a few restores usually JUST enough to save my butt. SO any more ideas . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kuhla Posted October 15, 2008 Report Share Posted October 15, 2008 Optimal setup for...... .......me would be...... A Western Digital WD6400AAKS 640GB in my computer ($75). Two SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ ($240) mounted in Raid 1 in a D-Link DNS-323 NAS box ($158). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi2155 Posted October 15, 2008 Author Report Share Posted October 15, 2008 I would go with a reliable drive rather than performance in a NAS box due to the bottlenecks encountered over the network would degrade any potential performance benefit between the drives to be rather negligible. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kuhla Posted October 15, 2008 Report Share Posted October 15, 2008 I would go with a reliable drive rather than performance in a NAS box due to the bottlenecks encountered over the network would degrade any potential performance benefit between the drives to be rather negligible. I don't trust my PC. I guess I don't trust any hard drives either. I'd feel safer having my data raided and in something like a NAS box (not just another PC either). The performance issue is of much smaller consequence to me at this time Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi2155 Posted October 16, 2008 Author Report Share Posted October 16, 2008 I don't see how anything you said related to what I mention O.o.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kuhla Posted October 16, 2008 Report Share Posted October 16, 2008 I don't see how anything you said related to what I mention O.o.... You said you would rather have storage drive(s) connected directly to the PC than to a NAS box due to performance concerns. I stated WHY I would rather have my storage drive(s) in a NAS box since I never explained that in my first post mentioning it. Going back on topic though.... I'd probably try Option 2. It is the cheapest solution since it seems your problem is more a matter of organization than current drive size limitations. There may be some problems with running the games from another drive other than the primary one but you'll just have to wait and see which ones make a fuss. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi2155 Posted October 17, 2008 Author Report Share Posted October 17, 2008 You said you would rather have storage drive(s) connected directly to the PC than to a NAS box due to performance concerns. I stated WHY I would rather have my storage drive(s) in a NAS box since I never explained that in my first post mentioning it. You misread my post entirely.....I was questioning your decision to use Samsung F1 spinpoints which were generally known for its performance rather than reliability. I was SAYING that since there are bottle necks that will limit the performance of a high performance drive, I saw no reason to go for performance than a reliability in a NAS configuration such as a Seagate SV series, or Western Digital's Green power/RE series of drives. Yeah, I was thinking more along the lines of option 2 as well. Games starting to get bloated faster than I expected. I also will still be installing some games on my primary drive, but other larger one's onto the new partition. I currently have UT3 and BF2 installed on my 500 GB as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kuhla Posted October 17, 2008 Report Share Posted October 17, 2008 You misread my post entirely.....I was questioning your decision to use Samsung F1 spinpoints which were generally known for its performance rather than reliability. I was SAYING that since there are bottle necks that will limit the performance of a high performance drive, I saw no reason to go for performance than a reliability in a NAS configuration such as a Seagate SV series, or Western Digital's Green power/RE series of drives. Oh I see. Actually I had picked those because they are the cheapest on newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList....%2C14%2C18%2C20 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi2155 Posted November 22, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 22, 2008 Zomg....constantly...going around... 3 GB or less of free space....need bigger drive...zomg. I even installed a ton of stuff but new games are just so big! I think i'll swap to the 500 GB Maxtor as a primary and figure out what to do with everything else later.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kuhla Posted December 15, 2008 Report Share Posted December 15, 2008 I'm seriously considering buying a Samsung 750GB hard drive when my next paycheck comes in. I'd really like to consolidate a lot of my data on to that drive and then use it as storage. I would probably then reformat (something I would like to do) and the just continue to use my Seagate 7200.9 300GB drive as the primary. My Seagate 7200.11 is flaky and I no longer trust it so I'd like to move my data off of it. I'd love to have a 1TB raid-1 NAS but the only way that would happen is if my parents bought it so I don't see that happening. I guess I could try turning one of my old PCs in the closet into a nas with that one linux distro but that seems like more work then I'd like to put into it and still no raid. Oh well. Whatever. I also think a video card is in my distant future. Stuff is cheap right now though already. 4870 512MBs for $180. No upgrade plans otherwise right now. Other priorities. *edit by Jedi2155* Moved due to primary content belonging to another topic. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi2155 Posted December 15, 2008 Author Report Share Posted December 15, 2008 Ah, make sure you still have enough for a game or 2 of airsoft this winter....unless you're out entirely.... I got my 1.5 TB 7200.11 for less than $0.08/GB after tax and shipping, and I'm absolutely loving it. As soon as I got it I did the new firmware update and I've experienced no issues since. Since my 160 GB raptor had reached a new low of 28.5 MB free the other night, I am so glad I have this new drive! Current storage config: 160 GB Raptor - All OS + Some Installed Games + Programs + Documents (5-15 GB Free constantly changing) 1500 GB - 7200.11 - SPLIT 500 GiBi - Game Installations 897 GiBi - Media + Downloads 300 GB - 7200.9 - ISO's + Program Installers + Drivers + Reformat Stuff 500 GB - 7200.10 - Backup duties 160 GB - T7K250 - Moved to External Enclosure Regarding the performance of my new 7200.11.....H**Y S**T!!!!! So I was copying over some files from my old drives over to the 7200.11, and I noticed I was transferring almost 60 MB PER DRIVE, for an actual copy rate of almost 120 MB/sec to the new sucker. God she's a beauty. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kuhla Posted December 16, 2008 Report Share Posted December 16, 2008 *edit by Jedi2155* Moved due to primary content belonging to another topic. Can't say I'm crazy about that but ok. Ah, make sure you still have enough for a game or 2 of airsoft this winter....unless you're out entirely.... Worst case scenario I just need enough for BBs and entrance fee. I think I'll have enough. I can't do SC Village until I buy a new mask since mine doesn't offer ear protection and I refuse to rent another super crappy mask from them. I got my 1.5 TB 7200.11 for less than $0.08/GB after tax and shipping, and I'm absolutely loving it. As soon as I got it I did the new firmware update and I've experienced no issues since. I would go with a bigger drive, like 1TB since they offer both more space and better price-per-gigabyte but I simple limitation of funds. I can't really spend more. Seagate My 7200.9 is very load during seeks. My 7200.11 is flaky. Was probably damaged when my last motherboard died. My most reliable drive to date is my ancient 120GB Western Digital. That thing has gone through 3 computers, many overclocks, power outages, you name it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi2155 Posted December 16, 2008 Author Report Share Posted December 16, 2008 Well, I only have one drive in my system that is over 3 years old and that is my Hitachi 160 GB. So....2nd up is my 7200.9 and 3rd (by a month) is my raptor. I swap drives quickly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kuhla Posted February 3, 2009 Report Share Posted February 3, 2009 This thread is for dicussion and advice of your storage configurations.....here's my issue.Ok. I'm having the same issue now and decided to "hijack" this thread (even though it's old). Here are the drives I currently have: ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Seagate 300GB (7200.9), SATA Currently being used as my primary drive in my computer. It is not partitioned but have a small storage folder. It currently has ~70GB of free space. Solid drive. Never given me any trouble. It's seeks are a bit loud though.Seagate 500GB (7200.11), SATA This is currently being used as an external storage. I do not trust it at all. I used to have a number of issues when this drive was connected to my system as a primary or secondary. I theorize that it was damaged when my old DFI Dark motherboard died. As of lately however it has not given me any trouble when accessing all my storage data on it via USB dongle. This drive is close to capacity but with a little house cleaning I could probably delete 1/3 of it.Western Digital 120GB, IDE I don't remember the other model data (Caviar, etc.). This drive is old. It has a little data on it that I would like to keep but it is not mission critical. This drive has just kept chugging and chugging. I think there is like 50GB at most of data on here I'd like to keep. Also, if you happened to miss it, this is an IDE drive. I don't want to use it anymore. I have my Windows 7 install on this right now and I do not enjoy getting my IDE cable out to play with it.Western Digital 36GB (Raptor), SATA I.... actually don't know where this drive is. I was looking for it last week and could not find it. Did I sell it to one of you or give it to anyone? It doesn't have any data on it that I would need but I would like to know where it is.~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ So that totals to about 680GB of data I'd like to store initially all on 1 storage drive/partition but I can probably cut that down to 550GB or something like that after some deleting (mostly from duplicate data). I can live with a 100GB primary drive/partition. That is ~800GB of initial space needed. In my ideal world I would want 2 drives.... (1) as the primary drive that would store the OS+games, that is not too big, that would carry no "permanent" data on it so that it could be reformatted often, and (2) a storage drive, that would be much larger, less performance oriented for all the data that I would like to "keep". Unfortunately this course of action is cost prohibitive for me at this time. So after thinking about it, I believe the only option left is to just buy one "bigger" drive and then just partition it. I am not a huge fan of partitions but it's the closest thing I can think of to my ideal setup without costing too much. The drives health and reliability would be very important since I would not have a full backup available on any other drive. So active cooling would be a must (via a fan blowing directly over it). I could possibly make partial backups of the more critical data on another drive, perhaps my 7200.9, but that remains to be decided on. A 1TB drive should give me about 930GB of useable space with which I would probably cut it up into a 170GB primary partition, 30GB secondary partition and a 730GB storage partition. That is probably cutting it a bit close to the 680GB of initial space I will probably need but I don't think I really have any other option. Looking at sizes and prices, here are some numbers from newegg.... 1.0TB - @0.093[per]GB - $ 95 - SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB 1.0TB - @0.117[per]GB - $120 - Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1.0TB - @0.093[per]GB - $ 95 - HITACHI 0A38016 1TB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 1.5TB - @0.085[per]GB - $130 - Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS There are 2 more 7200.11 Seagate drives listed on newegg which I have not listed here because I would actually like to avoid Seagate this time around. The combination of the distrust I have for my current seagate drives and their recent firmware debacle, I'm hesitant to consider them again. The 1.5TB is a teriffic deal though at $0.085 per GB. I've actually never owned a Hitachi drive and there is actually another 1TB drive listed on newegg for $120 with a 32MB cache but I cannot tell if anything else is different. Hitachi's website sucks. The Western Digital drive is definitely a good performing drive based on a number of posts and reviews I have seen that cite access time, sustained read/write, etc. data but it is not the best deal by a decent margin. So yea. Those are my current thoughts. I'm not exactly sure if I will even go through with all this but I am thinking about it with my next paycheck. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi2155 Posted February 3, 2009 Author Report Share Posted February 3, 2009 Although I don't have time to do a full response right now, regarding your backup situation, I would advise multiple copies of your critical data on various locations. I for example, have copies of my critical documents on the following: 1. My Primary OS drive 2. My Backup drive ( 500GB Maxtor 7200.10) 3. My sister's Toshiba Laptop 4. My Gateway Laptop 5. On DVD's which I will probably need to update (I plan on doing yearly physical media backups on DVD-RW's as that is currently where the data is held). + Flash drives So I can technically lose all my drives and still have multiple places to grab the data. I demand my data be as fault tolerant as the intarweb (and yes I do have some important files on the FTP as well which is then backuped by God knows how many drives). I wouldn't worry TOO much about drive reliability as long as you have sufficient backups. Also, I'm a fan of WD & Hitachi, and I was less than impressed by a Samsung F1 drive I used recently, but Seagate is just meh...they're cheap and long warrantied but with the recent 3 year warranty drop I would suggest going with the 1 TB Hitachi or the 1.5 TB Seagate if you want more space. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi2155 Posted February 8, 2009 Author Report Share Posted February 8, 2009 On a side note...I just corrupted my ENTIRE music library on both my NEW laptop and my main system. Again luckily I have a copy of the most recent sync with my MP3 player (although it'll require some file renaming) and a couple of months old sync with my toshiba laptop but i'm glad I had it backed up in multiple places.....never rely on a single backup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi2155 Posted March 17, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 17, 2009 Back to the point of WD & Hitachi being my favorite HDD's...but damn seagates for being so cheap. (I used them as secondary storage anyways...). http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/d...p_10.html#sect0 My 160 GB raptor is getting mighty cramped. I need to consider swapping it out soon. *edit* This might explain why the Core i7 system I built not too longer had horrible performance. It had a Samsung drive and my system usage habits absolutely killed its performance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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