How would you set up the data storage

[andrewkartashev]

Hi all.
I'm building a beefy computer for rendering and will have Virtual Box as well. I'll have a 1 terabyte SSD and two 3 terabyte 7200 rpm drives connected with SATA. I was wondering how others would set up the data storage.

I'm going to try to keep the host OS as clean as possible. I only want to install my art programs, utilities, and games. I'll be using one virtual box guest OS for surfing the web and will probably have it open all the time. Any ideas if if I must put it on the SSD or suffer slow response?

I will have some pretty huge 3d files. I plan to save it on one of the regular hard drives. I'd like as fast a load time,especially with this one program called Motionbuilder which is notoriously slow loading big files. Furthermore I want to bridge it with Maya and even on an SSD it chugs when I switch between programs.

And it would be nice to not have windows slow down searching for stuff in my archive as well..

I'm going to back up stuff externally so I don't want to use huge amounts of storage space on that internally. So I'm not going to mirror things. Striping though...I've never done it before and am open to the idea.

Oh, and I'm using Windows 8.1 pro.

 

[CountMike]

I do it just like you said, Installed OS and most important programs on SSD (256GB M.2) and instructed each program to save files on one of other two 2TB HDDs in respective (to a program) folders. Since you have a large SSD you can get programs that use temporary files and space on it, can speed up their operation quite a bit.
I have them in removable tray and third place in it is for backup disks, much faster than with USB.