How Big a Hard Drive do I need

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rmbelson

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I'm having a new PC built, Win 10 system with a SS main drive and RAID 1 SATA drives for my data and large music library. Goal is to keep the computer a long time, so drives need to have room for expansion and headroom. The SS drive will be 250GB for Win 10 and Program files. Plan is for 2 2TB SATA Drives.

My current Win 7 system splits 966 GB of OS, Program Files, Data and Music between 2 1TB drives. I wonder if new system needs 3TB SATA drives instead of 2 TB. If I deduct ~100GB for Win10 and Program Files which will be on SS drive, that leaves 866 GB on the 2TB drives. How much headroom will I need for drives to function well? FYI, current Win7 PC is 6.5 years old. Thanks RMB
 
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captaincharisma

captaincharisma

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Oct 13, 2004
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i guess it depends on how much data you expect to be downloading and storing over the furture, unless you still rip DVD's and bluray video and keep downloading music then you will need more storage space. these days you can get a good deal on a 4TB HDD and with the majority of users streaming movies and music now instead of directly downloading them to their computers a big drive a 4TB+ drive you last you quite a long time.
 
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Gadhar

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There is no way to know how much head room a person will need because programs and files increase in size all of the time, but then again maybe Pied Piper will become reality and we can all rejoice that one 120g SSD will be more than enough room XD. For example I have over 5tb's of storage andd I am down to less than a 1tb. This system is almost a year old and I thought I would have had plenty of room, but alas nope. I would say go as big as your budget allows.
 
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rmbelson

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OK, thanks. I'm a bit of a dinosaur and still rip CDs and DVDs now and then. Not into streaming music really, I like my collection as it is. I think I'll push to 3TB, squeezing the budget but I'm sure I won't regret it.
 
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geofelt

geofelt

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It is easy to add a HDD later if you need more storage space.
How big initially, I can't say; you know better.
Larger drives will cost less per gb than smaller ones.

You might find this article useful on the different types of WD hard drives:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Understanding-the-WD-Rainbow-674/

A thought:
The value of raid-1 and it's variants like raid-5 is that you can recover from a drive failure quickly. It is for servers that can not tolerate any interruption.
Modern hard drives have a advertised mean time to failure on the order of 500,000+ hours. That is something like 50 years. SSD's are similar.
With raid-1 you are protecting yourself from specifically a hard drive failure. Not from other failures such as viruses, operator error,
malware, raid controller failure fire, theft, etc.
For that, you need external backup. If you have external backup, and can tolerate some recovery time, you do not need raid-1

Instead of using that second 3gb drive in raid-1, put it in an external enclosure and develop a backup plan.


 
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rmbelson

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Interesting. I have external HDDs plus a cloud-based subscription to nightly backup. I admit to not doing the External Drive back up all that frequently, but with the new system I could create a disk image of the SS drive so my OS and Program Files would be there if that drive fails. Hmm.
 
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captaincharisma

captaincharisma

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it's always best to go with the biggest HDD you can afford at the time a 4TB HDD should only be a few bucks more then a 3TB one. if you get multiple HDD's in the future stay away from RAID. RAID only offers more point of failure no matter what type you use and can cause problems if you don't know what you're doing
 
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seagate_surfer

seagate_surfer

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Hello rmbelson, the important thing here is getting the right drive for the right job. There are many manufactures out there and choosing a drive is easier when you know what you want it for and what budget you have allocated. Let us know if we can answer any questions; we're here to help.
 
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rmbelson

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Well, the drive is usually on 24/7. My builder likes Seagate IronWolf for this or WD Red. I'm waiting on getting a quote on either 3TB or 4.

 
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rmbelson

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Should have added, the drive will be split between data from word processing, various office apps, financial apps, data from music editing apps and epub files, and to serve music and sometimes video to the other devices on the system.
 
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seagate_surfer

seagate_surfer

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Just wanted to share the characteristics on the IronWolf drives with you. If you scroll down you will find the different models and specifications.
 
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captaincharisma

captaincharisma

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just make sure you research HDD brands on your own. seagates new drives haven't been out long but in the past seagate has had a shaky track record when it comes to failure rates vs other brands.

 
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