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High-speed mass storage on a budget

Tags:
  • Storage
  • Speed
  • Western Digital
Last response: in Storage
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January 3, 2014 3:16:22 PM

Hello everybody, I've been mining litecoin for a few months now and I've made a decent little bit of spare cash (paid off my graphics cards + ~$400 at current market prices) and I'm planning to use some of my earnings to upgrade my storage.
My current configuration is not exactly ideal, with a 120GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD boot drive and a 1TB Western Digital MyPassport external drive that I've managed to completely fill in the past 4 months. If you're interested in the rest of my build, you can find all the specs and photos here.
What I'm looking for is 4TB of storage with the absolute maximum performance I can get for $350. I still have not decided what sort of configuration I want, but I know that I want Western Digital. I work in IT and have had bad experiences with pretty much all other HDD manufacturers except WD. As of my writing this, the Newegg prices for WD drives are as follows:

WD Black
1TB: $90
2TB: $150
4TB: $250

WD Red
1TB: $79
2TB: $105
4TB: $190

WD Blue
1TB: $60

WD Green
1TB: $67
2TB: $90
4TB: $170

The primary use of this storage will be for gaming and media storage. As I stated above, my budget is $350, and I'd like 4TB of storage with the highest performance possible. What I'm wondering is if I'd be best off with a single 4TB Black drive, or a RAID of 4x 1TB drives, or even something like a 4TB green for movie/video storage and a 250-500GB SSD for games, or something similar. As of my writing this, I have some 370GB of movies and music and 300GB of games (and another couple hundred GB of uninstalled games). I'm just hoping for a little back-and-forth discussion on the pro's and con's of each different potential configuration with other people who know what they're talking about.

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January 5, 2014 1:33:58 PM

What is so special about this particular model of Black drive? Is it the dual core processor and 64MB cache? How would this drive compare to, say a RAID 0 of 2x 2TB Red drives in seek time and read speed? Or perhaps a 5-disk RAID 5 of 1TB Blue drives? Do you know of any good sources of benchmarks for hard drives and HDD RAID arrays? I know the internet is filled with SSD benchmarks, but I've never been able to find any good HDD benches.
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