you could always get a hybrid drive just to confuse you further

A hybrid drive may be a good choice for your needs, I can't say how good they are or not though as I've not tested them.

Most come with 3 year warranties which is a good bonus. Price wise you can get a Seagate Barracuda 1TB SSHD for £60 odd, so not too sore on the wallet.

dont really think i need a hybrid, i think a normal HDD (a good fast WD Black) should be fast enough to not bottle neck games ? i aint arsed for an extra 5 seconds load time on game, and i already got a SSD so i can boot up pretty fast.

No modern HDD would bottleneck a game, most games are designed to be loaded from DVDs which are a lot slower than HDDs.

Even a 24x DVD drive would only give you a theoretical maximum throughput of 31.68 MBps.

My husband says he agrees with B movie. you need sata 6 and western digital are the dogs in HDDS.
Look at solid state to run the system or velociraptor HDD. both these are western digital.

this is how my husband would build a pc if he had that mobo:

First HDD = solid state hdd will make your system run like lightening.
second HDD = solid state again...or velociraptor. TO STORE ALL GAMES. install steam on this hdd and any other games you play like origin etc.
Third Hdd = monstor sorage western diigtal 6tb+ if you can afford it. for photos/music/itunes/films/porn etc.

CONS.
First HDD- you cannot defrag solid state HDD cos they break if you do. (they may have sorted that issue now but doubtful!)
Second HDD - get some rubber washers to dampen the noise from spin as they run very very fast.
Third HDD - if it breaks..you've lost 6TB of memories/music/dloads in one shot!

BE AWARE- make sure your power supply is sufficient enough to run all those HDD's aswel as your gfx card, processor, some gfx cards need a minimum of 650watt psu.
Add up the wattage of each component and buy power supply to suit. or just go for the biggest baddest Antec quattro. Minimum power supply is not good enough your system will shut down, bottleneck or blow up components like it did to my husbands pc he built cos he didnt have enough power in the PSU to all those components at the same frikken time. That was an 800watt Thermal Tech gamers PSU.

so, if i buy 2 x WD Black 1tb HDD's, i should run them STRIPE ?

i got my SSD, i will put ONLY my OS on that.

Then i connect my new HDD's into port 2 &3 ? and how do i set em in RAID ? do i put steam folder on one ? or both ?

Also, can i partition both RAID drives ? so i can use some for storage on one and some for backup on the other ?

Does running them in RAID mean i half my storgae space required per HDD ? 100 gig of steam = 50 gig per HDD in RAID ?



i think i might need 3 new HDD's ? steam on RAID on 2 of em ? and a 3rd for files etc ? and i can use my current old HDD as a back up disc ?

Thanks a lot for your help everyone, as this is something i aint well clued up on

You should see how my files are stored on PC i save most stuff to my desktop on my SSD lol

if you havnt got your answer you want yet stealth steam msg me when im next on ill give you a lecture and whats best to get and such as you can trust me with hardware as i am not Microsoft Qualified and i had to about RAID 0 ,1,2 and 5 to get it along with many other technical things

When you use RAID the two disks will appear as one volume (you can devide that into further logical volumes if you want). The question I have is how much data do you need access to all the time?
As far as setup goes, you can use freeware or just the windows disk management.

Say you need 2TB of data, you'd want 2x 1TB on RAID with a 2TB drive to back it up for best performance.

Like I said though, no modern HDD will bottleneck a game so you can just get a single 2TB drive and a backup drive for it if you don't mind loading screens.

ok, understood



Lemme check my funds on saturday and i'll report back here before i buy


Also gunna do a realistic count of how much data i need

To put it another way you can never have too much Hdd space as your Data will expand exponentially to fill said space for example I went to backup a hdd that I have and found that the hdd was almost full that being a 1TB drive purchased a 3TB drive which is currently half full.
You may think that thats a lot of Hdd space but I currently have around 6TB in my pc of which most of it is taken up by photographs and currently adding around 3-6 GB/month.

I would go for the largest hdd setup that you can afford