Question Types of Storage you use

[mikeymikec]

I have a whole bunch of 2.5" to 3.5" adapters. I also have the right-angle SATA data cables. If I found a way to get the cabling in a healthy fashion to feed both 3.5" slots, I would have done.

From personal experience, hang a 2.5" SATA SSD in mid air and the board that the SATA sockets on the drive starts to have a bit of play in it. Since I can't imagine that would be a good thing in the long term, I try to avoid doing it.

Re kill SATA cabling - the obvious ways like kinking up cabling.

 

[mindless1]

I'm really not understanding what you're stating. You managed to get an SATA cable from the mobo to the 3.5" HDD, what is different about putting a 2nd cable from mobo to the space 1" under the HDD, to an SATA SSD mounted in a 3.5" to 2.5" adapter?

 

[mikeymikec]

I'm really not understanding what you're stating. You managed to get an SATA cable from the mobo to the 3.5" HDD, what is different about putting a 2nd cable from mobo to the space 1" under the HDD, to an SATA SSD mounted in a 3.5" to 2.5" adapter?

As I said previously, the 3.5" rack is mounted perpendicular to the board and points towards the 'back' side panel of the case, and there's a rim that obscures access to the bottom slot and there's little room to play with. Running a power cable from the top of the bay to the bottom results in upside-down power connectors, and attempting to get either type of SATA cable to the bottom bay requires a bit of contortion-ism. I think I also tried to run a SATA power cable beneath the bottom drive so the connectors would be oriented correctly but there wasn't room.

In a previous post, I wondered whether if I mounted the drives upside down then maybe I could make it work; I can't remember whether I tried this during the original build and it didn't work or whether I felt uncomfortable running the HDD upside-down (I have a vague memory that says that while HDDs are fine oriented which ever way as long as they're stable, it's best to choose an orientation and stick with it, and the HDD has always run right-side-up).

As I'm going to be opening my PC again soon I might well try playing with that again if anything out of curiosity.

 

[manly]

I have a whole bunch of 2.5" to 3.5" adapters. I also have the right-angle SATA data cables. If I found a way to get the cabling in a healthy fashion to feed both 3.5" slots, I would have done.

From personal experience, hang a 2.5" SATA SSD in mid air and the board that the SATA sockets on the drive starts to have a bit of play in it. Since I can't imagine that would be a good thing in the long term, I try to avoid doing it.

Re kill SATA cabling - the obvious ways like kinking up cabling.

An SSD is so lightweight that it really doesn't matter how you choose to "mount" it. But you can use two-way tape or velcro to secure it.

 

[mikeymikec]

An SSD is so lightweight that it really doesn't matter how you choose to "mount" it. But you can use two-way tape or velcro to secure it.

'tis true

 

[BoomerD]

My current PC has 3 NVMe dtives, (2TB Gen 4, 1 TB Gen 4, 1TB Gen 3) and a 2 TB HDD.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Main PC is an m.2 and two SATA SSDs. Server is HDDs.

 

[hulan]

I currently have a single 1TB SSD installed that holds everything on my computer. The storage space is almost completely occupied right now. I think I need some extra space for videos/pictures and games mainly. I like to keep several large Steam games installed at once so I can switch between them, I'm wondering if I should get an SSD for games and an HDD for videos, or an SSD for both?

 

[Brainonska511]

I currently have a single 1TB SSD installed that holds everything on my computer. The storage space is almost completely occupied right now. I think I need some extra space for videos/pictures and games mainly. I like to keep several large Steam games installed at once so I can switch between them, I'm wondering if I should get an SSD for games and an HDD for videos, or an SSD for both?

What is your motherboard, what kind of space does your case have, and what are you looking to spend at most? Is the existing SSD NVME or SATA?

 

[Red Squirrel]

I tend to do SSD for OS, HDDs in raid for mass storage. If I build a new machine now I'd probably go m.2 for the OS. I try to keep all my data on my 24 bay NAS as it has redundant power, raid, and also handles spinning disk and cold storage backups. Downside is if the whole box fails, such as an OS failure, then I lose access to everything and would need to rebuild the OS and possibly restore from backups, which would be a pain as I would be completely down during that time.

I want to look into a clustered setup like Ceph eventually. I'm doing power upgrades right now which has been an ongoing project as funds permit. Once that's done my next step is upgrading my hardware/OSes and incorporate more redundancy into my whole setup.

 

[Shmee]

I tend to do SSD for OS, HDDs in raid for mass storage. If I build a new machine now I'd probably go m.2 for the OS. I try to keep all my data on my 24 bay NAS as it has redundant power, raid, and also handles spinning disk and cold storage backups. Downside is if the whole box fails, such as an OS failure, then I lose access to everything and would need to rebuild the OS and possibly restore from backups, which would be a pain as I would be completely down during that time.

I want to look into a clustered setup like Ceph eventually. I'm doing power upgrades right now which has been an ongoing project as funds permit. Once that's done my next step is upgrading my hardware/OSes and incorporate more redundancy into my whole setup.

What NAS setup are you using? Assuming you are using ZFS pools, you can always import them to another OS that supports them pretty easily if your boot drive/OS fails.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Using mdraid right now, but I have looked at ZFS as well and might do that for my next build if I don't end up doing Ceph. mdraid is nice too as the drives can easily be imported into a new OS as well, so in theory if I build a new NAS I could cold migrate the arrays over to the new one. It would still involve downtime but it would be relatively short as I can test the new NAS ahead of time, setup the shares etc before I do the final transfer.

 

[bigboxes]

I have 2 x 2TB m.2 NVMe drives and 3 x 2TB HDD drives in my main rig. The first m.2 drive is a PCIe Gen4 SSD. It is for my OS, most software and regularly accessed media. The other m.2 drive is Gen3 and is for games. The three HDDs are my thrash drives, when I download stuff temporarily and frequently do lots of writes. No need to wear out my m.2 SSDs for that stuff. They're enterprise rated and should last twice as long as my SSDs. On my server, I have one m.2 Gen3 SSD that is for the OS and a limited number of software. The rest are 8 HDDSs that are Enterprise models between 8-10TB.

 

[Mahboi]

So I got my Seagate Exos X14 12To HDD (X16/X18 can also be found in other countries) refurbished.
It was indeed new, or seemingly so anyway.

The Good:
Seems in pristine condition, CrystalDiskInfo just notes it as "Good" (I.E 100% functionality)
Is fast, we're waaay ahead from old HDDs I left behind 10 years ago

I've tested it with images and videos, there is indeed a lag with images, they appear extremely pixelated for .1s then load in full quality, it's not significant but annoys me enough that I've elected to leave all my images on my SSDs. For videos though, I can't tell the difference, or it really isn't significant enough for me to care. I dumped years worth of external and internal SSD's worth of data (about 1To and some?) and freed a ton of space, then watched some of the vids off the new drive. Whether just loading them into VLC or skipping around different parts, I can't see any significant speed difference.

Since I wanted to have a much larger storage pool for longer videos but didn't want to see lag, this works great. Dumped basically all my older videos/films/animes and can just read it from there without any care. I was also aiming to have better video recording quality despite it getting pretty heavy (8Go per hour for 4K on an RDNA 3 AV1 encoder at OBS CQP 20). Now that I have very high amounts of storage, I basically don't need to care about quality levels being too high, if the GPU can take it, the HDD can take it.

So its all win this way. And for 12To for 135€ I'm reaaaaaally happy about it.

The Bad:
Buzzing (light but constant when on)
Heads making occasional clicking noises
Windows randomly waking it up

I spend most of my PC time on the internet and not in my files. So the HDD will typically go to sleep some time after being used, but while it's still on, you can hear a distinct buzzing noise from my typically extremely silent PC. It's not "deadly", but yeah, I had a perfectly silent unit and now don't. Kind of a mild downgrade, but I can live with it being buzzy if it's constant, and it is. Random head noises are a bit different but they're rare, we're talking some random noise once every 15-30 mins for no discernible reason.

The real problem is Windows. For some times, it'll randomly wake up the drive despite me not using it. When it does, it's a bootup clicking fanfare (I don't mind much) and it's wear of the drive that I wish didn't happen randomly.
Also, Windows used to do this EVERY TIME I would load up file explorer. Because the drive was my F:, and would appear in the list of drives in the system. So I couldn't open file explorer without starting 20-30 mins of buzzing and booting a drive I wasn't going to use.

Quick fix I've gone for: removed the disk's mounting point as F:, created a "Storage" folder, and put the mounting point inside that folder. Seems to prevent it from starting all the time due to a random check by Windows.
Windows will still randomly start it sometimes (I imagine for updates or some crap) but at least I don't have to worry about it being started just from FE. Also, it's not starting on coming out of PC sleep, so I can just start the PC in the morning and not worry about buzzing or anything. I'll have to attach it a bit more securely and hope the buzzing gets less obvious (it's kind of laying rather than being screwed in rn).



Overall I'm pretty happy. It's a (hopefully) really high quality drive that'll last me a long time, helium sealed and all. I don't have to worry about running out of storage space in the next 5 years even if I record hours of video every week, and there's no significant speed drawback for the files that actually take large storage like movies. Could put games too, but they'd load slow. Images are more of a mild inconvenience than a real problem, they'd work well enough. The noise is a significant drawback, but I'm hoping my mitigation strategies to not start the drive all the time for naught will play out well.

 

[mikeymikec]

Windows will still randomly start it sometimes

Just Windows being Windows. If you ever find a solution for that problem, I would like to know what it is! I suspect there's far too many scenarios where Windows decides to enumerate all the connected drives and determine their status.

With Linux Mint this happens a lot less.

 

[Mahboi]

Just Windows being Windows. If you ever find a solution for that problem, I would like to know what it is! I suspect there's far too many scenarios where Windows decides to enumerate all the connected drives and determine their status.

With Linux Mint this happens a lot less.

For now, removing the drive from the list of drives and putting it in a virtual folder has worked great.
Windows doesn't start it often, it seems to be more of a "every few days" thing.

I'll have to play out with it a few weeks see if it is completely functional.

 

[mikeymikec]

For now, removing the drive from the list of drives and putting it in a virtual folder has worked great.
Windows doesn't start it often, it seems to be more of a "every few days" thing.

I'll have to play out with it a few weeks see if it is completely functional.

So now the drive is mounted as something like C:\Storage?

 

[Mahboi]

C:\Users\Mahboi\Videos\Storage\Drive_mounting_point

If I go into Videos, nothing happens, if I open the Storage subfolder, then the drive starts when Windows checks for the Drive_mounting_folder folder (which is just called F).
I won't be opening the Storage folder unless I want the drive to start, so...works for me. I also pinned the Storage folder in File explorer, so it's click that, drive starts, click F subfolder and we're in. Two clicks instead of one to prevent the drive to spin every time I start FE seems like a very reasonable trade.

 

[mikeymikec]

@Mahboi

If you make sure it's not indexed in Control Panel > Indexing, that might further reduce unwanted drive spin-ups.

 

[Mahboi]

@Mahboi

If you make sure it's not indexed in Control Panel > Indexing, that might further reduce unwanted drive spin-ups.

It wasn't indexing.
However I did find a very informative video, I'll try everything one by one and if I do find the point where all unwanted spinups will be gone, I'll post it:

List of Done:
- The HDD's mounting point is in a subfolder and doesn't have a "Letter:" so it doesn't get spun every time I open file explorer
- I'm not indexing on it
- Power plan set to 20 minutes (won't change it, I'd rather it keeps spinning 20 than start-stop if I ever use it every 10-15 mins or so)
- Created the NoLowDiskSpaceChecks DWORD in Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer and set it to 1

To possibly do:
- Stop the SysMain service (unlikely that I will)

Won't work:
- somehow won't let me change paging file nor start performance choices with admin mode...but I'm 500% sure that it's not running on the data HDD anyway

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I got into floppy drives again.

Been restoring some very old computers - recapping power supplies, cleaning and restoring floppy drives, etc.

It’s pretty gratifying to take a completely dead PC and get it functioning properly. And I’m getting a lot of soldering practice.

 

[Mahboi]

I got into floppy drives again.

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Out of all the answers in the world I would never have guessed this would come up.

 

[Golgatha]

My gaming rigs are all NVME and 2.5in SSDs, except I keep a "backup of the backups" 16TB HDD (WD Gold) in the 1st computer in my signature to sync my fileserver with periodically. My home fileserver is a mix of all types of storage.