OK, well you should get a large enough internal SSD for good loading speed for all your games and not needing to mess around with Steam multi-disk nonsense.
For your movies, it’s wasteful to ever put them on SSD because the faster speed doesn’t change anything. If you only ever plan to watch them on the PC where they’re stored, another internal HDD is fine. If you want to watch them anywhere in your household from on-LAN storage, that’s when you start thinking about external storage or NAS (although permanently leaving your desktop PC on and hosting off the internal HDD is also a fine option).
RAID isn’t worth thinking about. For the Cloud, there are two ways to use it. One is to host your unique documents that you wrote yourself on a small private cloud drive, so that you can’t lose them in a hard disk crash. The other way is to stream movies from services like Netflix instead of bothering to store them on a local disk.
Steam multi disk setups aren’t painful in the least in my experience
And using your desktop as a NAS of sorts doesn’t have to entail leaving it on all the time, just set up wake on LAN. Most OSes can inhibit sleep when someone is connected and streaming something over samba
But agreed on not bothering with RAID and making sure you have a remote mirror of all irreplaceable files, probably on a commercial service you can stand. iCloud has the best pricing model and security record but their Windows UX is fairly atrocious and they don’t support Linux at all.
Also, never get a non brand name SSD, they’re pretty much all terrible
there are pretty much only 3 name-brand storage vendors at this point: crucial/micron, sandisk/WD, and samsung (and only samsung still makes mSATA disks, and you generally shouldn’t buy a used SSD, the best value you’ll get on a product worth buying is manufacturer refurbished).
well, the fastest a SATA SSD can be is about 550-600MB/s peak, and they’d already reached that point 5 years ago (though many drives can’t deliver those speeds for random reads so SATA drives are still technically improving a little bit, but they can pretty much all do linear reads that fast).
NVMe SSDs take away that bottleneck and are currently at like 2GB/s and counting, which means they’ll be at the limit of PCIe3 4x pretty soon, but again, that’s just for linear reads under the best possible circumstances, and PCIe4 and 5 are coming soon
by comparison a 7200rpm hard drive peaks at about 150MB/s for linear reads and like a tenth of that for random reads
I wouldn’t consider the difference between NVMe and SATA to be noticeable in responsiveness the way platter to SSD was; I think random read and CPU single-thread are the bottlenecks there. I haven’t noticed it in something like game loading (again, I think we’re CPU bottlenecked), and most of my file movement is from this drive to external media, or internet to drive, so too slow to saturate SATA.
The way I’d put it is that the main reason HDD->SSD upgrade was noticeable is latency went from ~10ms to ~0.1ms, a 100x improvement. Random read bandwidth is sort of an indirect outcome of that. We won’t see another 100x anything transition anytime soon
Thanks for the advice y’all! @Broco I think my problem then is that I really want a a drive for both the games and videos. My main compy is also actually a lappy so I can really only fit one more in there. Not too keen on replacing the current 250 GB SSD in it currently with something bigger either since it’s M.2 and it would kind of just be wasted then what with it not even fitting in any of my older, mostly unused, rigs.
Maybe just get another 1 TB SSD and another nice big external one soonish from now that’s just plugged in most of the time? Been meaning to buy one that has USB 3.0 (this does make a noticeable difference, right?) anyway. Cable clutter though…
Using a cloud service for offsite backups is a good idea but, by the rule that you actually have N-1 copies of any bit of data, having zero copies of data on hardware that I own makes me nervous. I also employ a RAIDed NAS backup that duplicates itself to the cloud. I acknowledge that this is probably overkill.
After almost breaking apart in indecision I bought a 1 TB SSD. It will need to sit on my desk with the receipt for at least a day before my brain is done processing it.
All the backup talk had me wondering about another question though: What’s solution that backs up a Windows computer regularly that’s such a simple process that even my grandma could do it? The most it can ask of you is to clearly tell you that you need to plug in an USB drive when necessary. Best solution would probably be to save automatically to Dropbox or something but say the person is also very against any additional monthly fees of any kind.
The most simple solution is a cloud-linked directory with a service like Dropbox, iCloud or Google Drive. You install the piece of software on your computer and tell it to automatically copy any file created or modified in there to the network. The convenience is part of why I recommend it. (EDIT: I wrote that before noticing the part about monthly fees, but personally, I don’t see a reason to prefer up-front expense and wasted time maintaining your system to monthly fees – backups cost you regardless.)
Cloud companies make so many replicas of your data (on the order of ~10 in hot storage and perhaps hundreds in cold storage backups) that another variety of paranoiac is worried about the opposite, that if you ask them to delete your data they’ll fail to and it’ll still be lost in there somewhere available to hackers or subpoena. Personally, I’m convinced that used to be the case with most providers before GDPR (and even post-GDPR I still worry about how challenging it is to comply – requires very consistent record-keeping and data architecture).
They’re both probably fine. I got the edgerouter because the first unifi ap I had used weird ubiquity-only 24V PoE, so my choice was more motivated by hardware compatibility than routing quality.
I acknowledge both of those points but I personally know people who have been denied access to their own data that exists in ~dectuplicate on other people’s hardware. I don’t need the data to exist for its own sake or for other people’s access; I need it to exist for my own access.
I’m not at all anti-cloud; I just believe that you ought to maintain a backup on your own hardware as well.
You could also use two cloud services. Then you are good if your house burns down and one of the cloud providers denies access at the same time. Whereas your approach would lose data in that scenario.
As should be clear from how vanishingly unlikely the scenario I’m talking about here, I think using a single local disk copy and a cloud copy is extremely solid data safety, far more robust than any solution available to consumers (or even businesses!!!) fifteen years ago. Hard disk crash and provider denial are totally independent threats. They’re as likely to happen in the same week as getting struck by lightning probably.
yeah I think the much worse provider denial scenario is when you have no local copy (or if you’re using a cloud app that simply doesn’t provide unmediated access to your files otherwise), which some UX encourages
Most of America / the world doesn’t have sufficiently fast broadband to do cloud backups of large media files to two services. Just one strains my connection enough! Unfortunately, I don’t see this changing anytime soon
