The ADATA SSD in my father in law's PC developed errors somehow. It's just over a year old (the PC itself is a lot older). He wants me to buy him a new PC that's 'fastest and safest', 'money is no object'.
He does very little with his PC. Basically it's used for e-mails in Outlook, a little web browsing (mainly shopping and bureaucratic stuff), a little Word / Excel (no calculations), scanning and printing documents. In terms of storage, a 240GB drive is over the top, but he wants 'a lot of storage' in his fastest PC.
The way I see it, the PC will revolve around storage. CPU doesn't matter much. A low end CPU plus SATA SSD will likely be fast enough for him when it comes to speed (although NVMe is an option). The important thing is that the PC will be fault tolerant when it comes to disk problems and will be able to continue functioning.
So I'm thinking of using two SSDs in RAID 1 (for redundancy, not speed). There's also mirroring in Windows, but I assume that it's a worse option for a boot drive. (Am I right?)
I plan to buy two 480GB SSDs with a 5 year warranty, on the assumption that drives with a long warranty are less likely to develop errors, and RAID them. I will likely add some offline or online backup, but the main goal is to have everything continue to work even if one drive fails.
As I understand it, RAID 1 writes match the slowest drive, but reads should be at least as fast as the fastest. Right? If I stick both an NVMe drive and a regular SSD drive, would that give the read speed of NVMe? Is RAID for NVMe even supported by default on modern (low end) motherboards?
Also, would it be a good idea to buy drives from two different families, on the assumption that they're less likely to fail at around the same time?
Any particular drive brands which are known to be reliable and long lasting?
Any other comments?
Thanks in advance!
He does very little with his PC. Basically it's used for e-mails in Outlook, a little web browsing (mainly shopping and bureaucratic stuff), a little Word / Excel (no calculations), scanning and printing documents. In terms of storage, a 240GB drive is over the top, but he wants 'a lot of storage' in his fastest PC.
The way I see it, the PC will revolve around storage. CPU doesn't matter much. A low end CPU plus SATA SSD will likely be fast enough for him when it comes to speed (although NVMe is an option). The important thing is that the PC will be fault tolerant when it comes to disk problems and will be able to continue functioning.
So I'm thinking of using two SSDs in RAID 1 (for redundancy, not speed). There's also mirroring in Windows, but I assume that it's a worse option for a boot drive. (Am I right?)
I plan to buy two 480GB SSDs with a 5 year warranty, on the assumption that drives with a long warranty are less likely to develop errors, and RAID them. I will likely add some offline or online backup, but the main goal is to have everything continue to work even if one drive fails.
As I understand it, RAID 1 writes match the slowest drive, but reads should be at least as fast as the fastest. Right? If I stick both an NVMe drive and a regular SSD drive, would that give the read speed of NVMe? Is RAID for NVMe even supported by default on modern (low end) motherboards?
Also, would it be a good idea to buy drives from two different families, on the assumption that they're less likely to fail at around the same time?
Any particular drive brands which are known to be reliable and long lasting?
Any other comments?
Thanks in advance!