Question Building first PC - storage advice?

[els1122]

Hello, I am building my first PC with the main purpose of using it for 3D Animation (modelling, rigging, animation and a bit of rendering), and a secondary purpose of some gaming and am looking at which components will fit me best. I'm very new to this so have been doing some research and for my storage I am thinking of an HDD for files I'm not currently using (animation files I've completed/moved on from etc and any other general files), a NVMe for current files and programs such as Maya, Blender, Adobe programs and games, and finally another drive for my OS (Windows) as i've heard it is good to have this on a separate drive. I would really appreciate any thoughts on this and if this sounds good or not - again I'm just learning so I thank you for any input. My budget isn't too big, probably around £1500-£1750 for all the main components, but I believe the principle will probably be the same. Any advice on suggested storage size of each would be great too Thanks in advance!

 

[tennis2]

I'd just go with a NVMe SSD + HDD setup. No reason to have an OS-only drive.

Capacity-wise, you'll be the best judge of that. How many GB of files are you generally keeping in active/SSD storage? How many GB of files do you currently have for archival/HDD.

 

[Gam3r01]

Having a separate OS drive is old advice, back when SSDs were expensive and easy to fill up.
I would agree, NVME (of whatever size you need for your games, OS, and animation files) and an HDD or SATA SSD (of whatever size for long term bulk storage).

 

[punkncat]

If you are using your secondary drive as the scratch drive it isn't really a bad idea to have that separate. I use(d) a setup very similar until quite recently. I had primary OS drive on an NVME, a bigger SSD as the scratch and frequent access drive and a very large HDD as archive storage. I also set up a backup of the archive storage elsewhere. In my particular instance the frequently accessed drive is where Dropbox resides, so it's being backed up "in the cloud" as well.

 

[hotaru.hino]

I still go with separate drives because I have a tendency to go "eff it" and refresh Windows once in a while.

At the very least I would say keep your data on a separate drive. Apparently things do go south with system updates and whatnot. Though of course, you should routinely back up your data anyway.

 

[tennis2]

2TB + 6TB enough?

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i7-12700F 2.1 GHz 12-Core Processor (£317.99 @ Box Limited)
CPU Cooler: Deepcool AK620 68.99 CFM CPU Cooler (£48.50 @ Computer Orbit)
Motherboard: MSI MAG B660M MORTAR WIFI DDR4 Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard (£151.97 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory (£116.99 @ Box Limited)
Storage: Western Digital Black SN770 2 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive (£169.98 @ Ebuyer)
Storage: Western Digital Blue 6 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive (£109.90 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: MSI GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB VENTUS 2X OC Video Card (£373.48 @ Ebuyer)
Case: Tecware Forge M MicroATX Mini Tower Case (£45.94 @ Box Limited)
Power Supply: EVGA G5 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply (£69.98 @ Scan.co.uk)
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