2x SSD and 4x HDD

[Mal Pherian]

I have a massive High end rig I am building, and I would like to include 2x 120gb SSD's in a raid 1 setup as the Boot Drive, and 4x 1tb HDD's in a Raid 1 Setup as the Data Drives.

I have looked for days online to try and find a way to do this, but I have come up empty. Can anyone suggest how?

OR

Can someone tell me what the optimal Drive setup would be for a computer with 2 SSDs and 4 HDDs?

Thanks in advance
Mal

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Is your high end rig for gaming or professional work?

Since you are building a massive high end rig am I correct in assuming the two high end ssd's will be either PCIe 3.0 x 4 NVME or M.2 3.0 x4 NVME?

 

[Mal Pherian]

Is your high end rig for gaming or professional work?

Since you are building a massive high end rig am I correct in assuming the two high end ssd's will be either PCIe 3.0 x 4 NVME or M.2 3.0 x4 NVME?

It is for Gaming, and will have a R9-295x2 GPU (If that Matters I prefer AMD), and a Crossfire Formula Z Motherbaord with a FX-9590 CPU.

SSD's - http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-BX100-120GB-Internal-Solid/dp/B00RQA6LQY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1436791125&sr=8-1&keywords=Crucial+120gb+SSD

HDD's - http://www.amazon.com/Black-Performance-Desktop-Hard-Drive/dp/B00FJRS6FU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1436791214&sr=8-1&keywords=WD+Black+HDD

I thought about going with Raptor drives but from reading reviews they seem to have a high DOA and Failure rate so I decided a more reliable Performance black drive might be best.

NOTE: I have not purchased my drives yet, so if need be I can change the setup, but the rig will have 6 drives total. My case is the Sentey Cyclone GS-7000 (Azza Hurrican 2000), and has 4 HDD drive bays and 2 SSD Drive bays (Quick Slot Drive bays with Push/Pull Connect easy removal trays).

Case: http://www.sentey.com/en/cyclone-gs-7000

 

[game junky]

If all your doing is gaming, do yourself a favor and:

Use a single disk for your OS - a Samsung 850 Evo 500GB will increase your local storage, it's fast and it's reliable.
You have 6 SATA ports you can use for a RAID configuration based on your motherboard specs - get (6) 1TB disks and setup a RAID 5+1: you'll get a performance increase and still can lose 2 disks simultaneously without losing data. If you elect to run a RAID setup, I would recommend backing up data that would be painful to re-create.

If it were me, I wouldn't waste the time, money and aggravation to setup that configuration. My gaming rig is running a 500GB SSD for my OS, a 250GB SSD for my shared music files (media server for whole home), a 3TB HDD with local copies of my ripped video files and they're backed up to a 4TB My Cloud External Hard Drive. Copying from the SSD to the HDD is very quick and copying those files to the External Drive over the network is quick and easy. Take the money you save and put them into upgrading to 300 series GPUs assuming you haven't purchased the cards yet.

 

[George Mulligan]

Top of the line SSDs (non PCIe) would be Samsung 850 Pros. Truly highest end SSDs are PCIe cards. Also, 120GB is quite small- you will only be able to get the OS and a couple games on it. This seems to be a mismatch for 2 TB of data storage. You might consider larger SSDs to load your games onto.

 

[Mal Pherian]

The SSD's are for the OS/Upgrades and Boot Only. The HDD Data Drives are for Game and Media storage. So the SSD size is not relevant as they will be empty except for the OS. I'll get the Samsung instead of the Crucial if that's better however.

I wanted to set the 2 SSD's up in a Raid one for the OS and Boot. The HDDs are for the Data Drives.

I was curious mainly as to how to set the SSD's up in a Raid in order to install the OS onto them both simultaneously in the Raid 1 Configuration.

I was considering entering the Bios and setting the 2 Higher sata ports to Raid, and the other 6 Sata ports to raid as well. then connecting the 2 SSDs to the 2 6gb Sata Ports (And seeing if I could set them to raid 1 in the bios, then installing windows), and the 4 HDDs to 4 of the 3gb Sata ports and setting them up in raid 1 in the windows 7 Pro disk management.

I am unsure if that will work however.

Also should I go with the Black drives or should I go for the Raptors?

 

[utgotye]

I can understand the 295x2...sort of, but there's simply ZERO reason for buying an FX 9XXX.

 

[Mal Pherian]

I can understand the 295x2...sort of, but there's simply ZERO reason for buying an FX 9XXX.

It's already overclocked and I don't have to deal with it... Mainly. Plus I can get it for the same price as an 8350. So I figure.. why not?

Why? Is there a specific reason I shouldn't?

Honestly.... I'd prefer to build an Intel/Nvidia rig (Simply because of the 64gb Motherboards etc, and the faster single core), But I am not about to pay 4x the amount for Intel for the same performance i'd get from AMD for a quarter of the price. Plus AMD last longer, and is far more reliable then Intel. Even though it's a bit slower.

Don't get it twisted, I'm not an AMD fan boy and I've owned and built both Intel and AMD in the past., and in my experience the Intel rigs always die years before the AMD ones, and generally have to be upgraded much sooner then the AMD ones as well, and are as I stated about 3-4 times more expensive for the same quality.

Hence why I chose AMD for this build, that and the future of gaming is moving toward a chips ability to multitask and mutithread, and that is the one area that AMD outshines Intel and always has performance wise.

So basically, I am attempting to future proof this build for the next 3-6 years, and AMD has a track record for Future proofing builds in that range, my current (AMD) rig is still running strong after 7 years with a 7770 (and a Phenom 2 965 Black) and runs anything I throw at it decently. My Intel rig died 3 years ago and I built it the same time as this AMD one and of the same quality.

So I figure this time instead of building 2 mid range comps, I'd just go with AMD and build a High end one.

 

[utgotye]

Why not? Because for your stated uses, a 4690K is better and the same price or lower.

Is there any particular reason you are going for RAID1? It seems like a waste of a drive to have a backup of your OS with no performance gain. A cheaper alternative would be to do system image backups weekly and put them on your data drive.

 

[Mal Pherian]

Why not? Because for your stated uses, a 4690K is better and the same price or lower.

Is there any particular reason you are going for RAID1? It seems like a waste of a drive to have a backup of your OS with no performance gain. A cheaper alternative would be to do system image backups weekly and put them on your data drive.

Mainly because the Case drive bays are set up for 2x SSD and 4x HDD, There is no way to change this without dismantling the entire quick slot feature of the case and buying separate and individual parts for it. While yes I could do this (And set it up to have 5 HDDs in Raid 5 and 1 SSD for the boot drive/OS), I don't see it as really necessary.

But if it comes down to it after reading all the replies here etc and I I get ready to buy the drives, I will.

Also the 4690k is 235$ I can get the AMD fx-9590 for about 150.00.

 

[Mal Pherian]

As an edit to this I found out that the 2.5 adapter for the 3.5 drive bay in the hot swap bays are actually removable. So I'll probably go with an SSD boot drive and 5 other HDD's.

Still not sure if I should spring for the Raptors or just get the black drives instead.