QOTW: How much storage do you have inside your main PC?

[danroyle]

128gb ssd and 1tb hard drive But i have a 2tb nas which i keep most of my stuff on

[SteveWilliams]

2 x 128GB SSD's. However, I do have about 13TB of storage on my HTPC.

[g8ina]

250GB SSD system, 1TB scratch data + 5TB main data.

[Marenghi]

5TB+ internal
1 x 128GB SSD for the OS
1 x 1TB for games
1 x 3TB for media
1 x 1TB for messing around with virtualisation (only spare available)

I've added 2TB to my storage from a few years ago, and that's not including the external 3TB backup drive I now use.

[nhhc]

6.5TB - hasn't changed in the last few years

[Wrinkly]

2 WD Black 1TB.
2 WD My Passprot Ultra 1TB.
Sandisk X300 512GB.
Sandisk Ultra II 480GB.

[GravitySmacked]

1 x 256GB SSD and 1 x 128GB SSD in my main rig. The rest is in my NAS.

[Jaffo]

PC:
250GB SSD (Win7/Win10/Steam)
1TB HD (Games/Media/Backups)
160GB (More games when the 1TB was running low!)

NAS:
1TB HD

Hopefully, SSD prices will fall a little more this year and I can swap out the HDs for one.

[hairyonion]

Yeah people need to remember that RAID is not a good data protection method, certainly if using consumer grade drives.

Buying 4 x 8TB drives and putting them in a RAID array might seem like you are adding a layer of protection, but unless its RAID 1, you have to remember that you are adding other elements than can cause failure.
When building an array, you have to remember the device which actually manages it, is a point of failure.
Sure RAIDZ on something like freenas obfuscates this somewhat, but at the end of the day this only protects against DRIVE failure. If you do have a drive failure and you rebuild using the parity calculation, you have to thrash all your other drives for long periods of time during the process, in which time you can easily encounter another drive failure and lose everything. When working with single parity drive across a 4 x 8TB drives... that's some clenchy bum time rebuilding.

My unRAID array thankfully is not an array in the traditional sense, it keeps files as files on a drive formatted normally. If the array fails then I can get the individual files back. It has parity to protect for a drive failure still but even then, its still a bit of a risk whenever you have to check the parity. Soon they will be introducing the ability for redundant parity... which will be well received if successful.

The best way to back up and protect your data is to have it in two separate locations/arrays/drives. 'Cold' storage is, as far as im concerned, the best way to backup vital data, even if it is inconvenient.

RAID has drifted into the consumer space in recent years and I understand why, unfortunately the mentality and understanding of purpose has not come with it.

What other options are there, I'm talking about tb's of data I don't know of any other way. And the raid would work I understand your point of it not being a perfect solution but other than buying another set of hdds (which again is another point of failure) what other cost effective options exist?

[Biscuit]

What other options are there, I'm talking about tb's of data I don't know of any other way. And the raid would work I understand your point of it not being a perfect solution but other than buying another set of hdds (which again is another point of failure) what other cost effective options exist?

I dont think you understand the term, 'point of failure' in context. If you have 24TB of data all running through a single RAID card, a failure in the RAID card can result in total 24TB of data loss. It's a single point in the system that can result in total data loss.
If you have another set of drives with duplicated data from the RAID array (whether the second set of drives is an array or not is irrelevant) then if the RAID card dies, you still have a copy of the data. This does not add an addition point of failure, it protects you from the existing one. This is a backup and is the only way to properly protect your data.

As Peter said, RAID Is not a replacement for backup. It does not protect your data, it offers a level of protection for a drive failure but has risks associated with it, especially when using a striped array (such as 5 or 6).

There is no 'cost effective' alternative solutions. This is simply the cost of proper data management.

[Hulken68]

256GB ssd for Win 320GB general

[Hoonigan]

120GB Corsair Force 3 SSD
64GB Kingston SSD
500GB Western Digital HDD
250GB Maxtor HDD (This has been going 10 years now!)

[Splash]

Hmmm... in the PC there's

1 x 500Gb EVO SSD (OS and general apps)
3 x 300Gb 10k VelociRaptors in RAID0 which I use for VMware Workstation. Backed up daily, and I've had them for year.
1 x 1Tb EVO as the replacement for the above, but I need to get my act together and migrate the data to it
1.5Tb HDD which is just a dumping ground - extracted zip files, downloaded ISOs etc. I need to be replacing this soon, as it's years old (but because it's all transient data it doesn't really matter if it fails before I do so)
500Gb EVO Pro NVMe PCIe which I only recently picked up - idea being that this is used to simulate a top tier for any storage arrays used for testing stuff. Pretty quick...

On the network - there's a Thecus N5200 with 5 x 2Tb disks in which is used for general backups, as well as a second Veeam repo for the VMs for backup copy jobs, there's a Microserver running as a fileserver (5 x 2Tb disks connected to a P410 raid controller and setup as raid10 with one as a hotspare), then there's the main NAS: Synology DS1815+ with 2 x 500Gb EVO SSD for cache, plus 6 x 4Tb HGST 4Tb disks (R10), plus a DX513 expansion bay which has 3 x 8Tb archive disks (R1, plus spare) - this is used for LUN replication from the main unit. The Synology is the primary storage for the homelab.

Then there's a couple of other bits, but it's mostly in the above. Do I hold more data than I did a few years ago? Certainly, but there's not a significant increase in capacity in the main PC: the big change there is the gradual move from rust to flash.

[xslavic]

1x512Gb-ssd 1x128Gb-ssd 1x2Tb-WDgreen 1x2Tb-Hitachi7200 ||||
NAS DRIVES ----------- 1x4Tb-WDRED 1x750Gb-WDBLUE

[Luke7]

I have a whopping 320gb drive on my main gaming rig. That's it.

[pastymuncher]

Just a little bit less as I have now gone with 100% SSD's. I used to have a 240Gb SSD for windows and other programs along with a 1TB hdd for other stuff. Now I have a 250Gb SSD for windows and other main programs along with a 960GB SSD for Steam, photo's, music etc.