Average UHD File Size

[Chetwood]

I understand you should never exceed 80% of the drive.

Why is that?

[dcoke22]

I'm going to look into SAS vs SATA since I don't know much about it. Do you use SAS drives, would you recommend it in my case?

SAS & SATA refer to how the drive connects to the computer. All consumer oriented hard drives and computers use SATA. All my hard drives are SATA. You should use SATA. If you need SAS, you'll already know, as it is intended primarily for usage in a large array of drives in an enterprise. The only way a regular person will come close to SAS is in a large, home built NAS scenario where one buys a PCIe card with SAS connectors and then uses SAS-to-SATA multiplier cables to connect 4 SATA drives to a single SAS connector.

[leosantare]

SAS & SATA refer to how the drive connects to the computer. All consumer oriented hard drives and computers use SATA. All my hard drives are SATA. You should use SATA. If you need SAS, you'll already know, as it is intended primarily for usage in a large array of drives in an enterprise. The only way a regular person will come close to SAS is in a large, home built NAS scenario where one buys a PCIe card with SAS connectors and then uses SAS-to-SATA multiplier cables to connect 4 SATA drives to a single SAS connector.

Thanks again for clearing that up for me. I plan on getting a WD drive. What do you think about the WD Ultrastar (SATA) interface compared to the WD Gold? They both seem to be good drives.

[leosantare]

Why is that?

Of course, you can fill your drive up to the max, but it wouldn't be ideal. Logically, you would want some headroom as that goes pretty much with anything.

[Chetwood]

Of course, you can fill your drive up to the max, but it wouldn't be ideal. Logically, you would want some headroom as that goes pretty much with anything.

Yeah, no, not for harddrives. Especially not if the data on it doesn't change often.

[dcoke22]

As I understand it, the WD Gold and Ultrastar are the same drive internals these days, but marketed differently. The Gold is generally for regular people who want that class of drive. The Ultrastar comes in all kinds of various configurations to satisfy the needs of actual enterprise customers. I'd say buy whichever one is cheaper.

The Ultrastar name is one that WD acquired when it bought HGST… and HGST got that name when they bought IBM's hard drive business years ago.

As for filling the drive, in this scenario, I agree with Chetwood. Generally speaking, as a spinning drive gets full, performance can suffer both for lack of large blocks of free space to write new files and because the relative data rate of the inner tracks of the drive are slower than the outer tracks. In a general use case this is bad. For a mostly read workload of playing movies, I don't think it matters all that much, especially if you put your photos and documents on a separate SSD drive and only put movies on this big drive. As the drive gets full, it'll take a bit longer to write new movies to it and, strictly speaking, the maximum read rate of those movies would be lower, but it will still be high enough to exceed the read rate required to smoothly play a movie, even a 4K rip. I wouldn't fill it to zero bytes free of course, but I wouldn't worry to much if there was only a few gigabytes free.

[AngryVirginian]

I understand you should never exceed 80% of the drive.

Why is that?

80% is a general recommended best practice for Synology NAS volumes with SHR. The reason is that the extra headroom will make the array rebuild faster in case of repair (changing drive) or expansion (adding drives). Some people say 10% is enough but there is a new "Fast Repair" option in DSM7 which IIRC requires at least 20% free space in the volume.

[Woodstock]

with SHR

That's a key factor, because SHR requires large blocks to be read and re-written when updating data within that block. Gets messy when multiple drives in the array have such updates.

As mentioned, though, we're dealing with large block writes, rather that random updates, and if your drives aren't SHR, it's pretty much not an issue anyway.

For what it is worth, some SHR drives are way worse than others. Seagate SHR drives make the WD SHR drives look like speed demons, even on continuous writes (no random updates). My company policy is that Seagate drives are isolated in our backup process, and only used on days where their slow writes aren't an issue.

[leosantare]

As I understand it, the WD Gold and Ultrastar are the same drive internals these days, but marketed differently. The Gold is generally for regular people who want that class of drive. The Ultrastar comes in all kinds of various configurations to satisfy the needs of actual enterprise customers. I'd say buy whichever one is cheaper.

The Ultrastar name is one that WD acquired when it bought HGST… and HGST got that name when they bought IBM's hard drive business years ago.

Nicely said, as I was reading the same thing. I will go with the WD Gold 14TB/16TB for my 200 UHD disc collection. Like I said, I really never plan to exceed this amount. When thinking ahead, I will have about 800GB of total space needed for my document files, my uncompressed music files and my uncompressed picture files.

I already have a 512GB SSD dedicated for the OS/Programs and a 4TB SSD dedicated for Steam games. Currently, I have a 6TB HDD for my blu-ray rips, documents, music and pictures.

After getting a 14/16TB HDD, (would can easily fit my documents, music and picture files) do you really recommend getting a separate 1TB SSD for my documents, music and picture files? I like the idea of having everything else other than games on one drive. Then again, there could be some benefit and I certainly have the space in my PC to add another drive.

Thank you,

[dcoke22]

The ideal workload for spinning hard drives is larger files written and read in large linear chunks. Hosting a movie collection for example. I suppose a music collection is the same thing, so putting music files on a hard drive seems reasonable. Photos… I'd say it depends. If you're editing and working with the files all the time, I think you'd be happier with them on a SSD. I know I prefer my photos on a SSD. As for other documents, I think SSD is the way to go. As you use them, edit them and save them you more or less end up with a 'random' access pattern to that data, which is not the ideal for a spinning hard drive.

It might be the case that your documents are a small enough that they'll fit on your OS drive easily enough.

When I help my friends think through buying/building a new computer, I always encourage them to get a large main drive. 2 TB M.2 SSDs are 'reasonable' these days IMHO. That's usually enough to hold most people's stuff. When a collection of things grows large (games, photos, movies, music, whatever) you can add in whatever the right drive is to hold it.

[leosantare]

I'm set on not having anything other than the OS/Programs on the (C:) boot drive. This way, whenever I need to reinstall Windows, all my stuff is already there.

I will think about putting my docs, music and pictures on a different drive than my UHD's.

Thanks for all your help,