Question External, expandable, multi-drive enclosure to connect to one PC ?

[mistermerica69]

To sum it up, I'm a pc gamer whose barely scratched the surface of actually understanding the tech and I'm trying to find a way to expand my pc's storage capability externally in a way that essentially future proofs it and ends the cycle of deleting games to make room for others in todays rapidly inflating demands for storage space for games.

I've been going crazy through self research trying to teach myself about SATA 1,2,3. ESATA. PCIE adapters. etc. with no one source covering capabilities and limitations without an "if (x)".
The market is flooded with literally tons of single drive swappable enclosures but im struggling to find many ways that don't include just stuffing my tower with more drives and taxing my honestly pretty well taxed power supply too.

Any and all recommendations, advice, or even just tips on the ability and limits of the hardware are welcome. and thank you for your time.

 

[kanewolf]

To sum it up, I'm a pc gamer whose barely scratched the surface of actually understanding the tech and I'm trying to find a way to expand my pc's storage capability externally in a way that essentially future proofs it and ends the cycle of deleting games to make room for others in todays rapidly inflating demands for storage space for games.

I've been going crazy through self research trying to teach myself about SATA 1,2,3. ESATA. PCIE adapters. etc. with no one source covering capabilities and limitations without an "if (x)".
The market is flooded with literally tons of single drive swappable enclosures but im struggling to find many ways that don't include just stuffing my tower with more drives and taxing my honestly pretty well taxed power supply too.

Any and all recommendations, advice, or even just tips on the ability and limits of the hardware are welcome. and thank you for your time.

Storage is pretty low "tax" on your power supply. An 8TB HD is under 10W while active.
The question I ask is what problem are you trying to solve by having more local storage? Download time?

 

[faalin]

I'll tell you what, having all your games installed is not all that fun.

I have 2 18TB western digital red pro drives in my computer, between my Steam Library, Blizzard, EA, and Epic it takes up just north of 7TB on the drive. I have another 1TB of all my old CD/DVD games that i ripped to ISO images and a lot of not obtained correctly DOS and ROM games.

My steam library by itself is 852 games and has 20-25 games daily that are ether updating or patching so its always on in the background doing that stuff. I also have a program that backs up my game library from one 18TB drive to the other in my computer, and also sends a copy to my server because lets face it im not downloading 8TB of data again.



If you're still wanting to go external short of a full enclosure i would look at this LINK. I use a 2 bay one at work for cloning drives and have a single bay one at home on my desk if i ever need to pull data off a drive without powering down my compute and internally attaching it to my computer.