[SOLVED] 1* 4 TB HDD or 2* 2 TB HDDs? (Which Is Faster)

[Morad Tamer]

I am shopping for a new HDD(s)
My current system storage layout is
SSD for OS
then a shit ton of small capacity drives for everything else
I have my games library on a 500 GB old drive (Failing)
another one (500 GB) for my documents, pictures, music etc and gameplay recording (basically I remapped the windows library directories to it)
and a 2 TB HDD for my archive of downloads, editing projects (premiere pro mostly) and miscellaneous items I never opened in like 6 years but still don't wanna delete them (Failing as well)

yes I know my setup is a ticking time bomb

My use cases are gaming and recording then editing that recorded footage and right now whatever I'm doing I'll need to be accessing two HDDs simultaneously
Disk 1 Game Library
Disk 2 Recording
Disk 3 Where the exports go

I hope I made it clear enough
Note: I won't be using RAID at all (I have backups) , my concern right now is expanding the storage and possibly gain some speed improvements or at least a little bit of redundancy if one of the two drives fails unexpectedly, I don't lose everything (HDDs of choice are WD Reds (Blacks are out of budget))
PS: Motherboard is Asus B85M-E is that matters

 

[mdd1963]

currently 4 TB drives (WD Red or Seagate Ironwolf) are only about $120 .... w/ 6 TB drives logically priced at about 50% more... (Seagate 8 TB drives surprisingly on sale for $232 on Amazon...; beyond those capacities, price normally goes up too high and out of proportion to capacity increases achieved)

As you only have a limited amount of SATA ports, I'd try to get one large enough (4-6 TB) to hold all of your stuff, giving you room to add more drives later, allowing you to retire the small or failing drives...

Move the stuff that's important but rarely accessed to free cloud storage accts, such as Box, OneDrive, DropBox, Google Drive, Google Photos, P-Cloud, I-CLoud, Asus WebStor (free w/ Asus mainboard)