SouthGate Posted March 25, 2017 Share Posted March 25, 2017 To begin, my disk config: 1x SSD for OS, 4x1TB Western Digital Black and 3x Seagate 2TB What my usage is mostly is general use, gaming and a Vmware Workstation lab as I'm studying for some certificates. I'm not sure how best run my HDDs to accommodate this. The OS and my main apps will obviously exists on the SSD, for games I don't need more than about 500gb and my data takes up about 1TB. I want to have plenty of space for VMware including snapshots. I have the 4x1TB WD on the Intel RAID ports and the Seagate's I could run some kind of software RAID. What I really want to achieve is resilient data storage and performance for VMware and games. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DevTech Posted March 25, 2017 Share Posted March 25, 2017 Avoid RAID whenever possible. It delivers most of the performance gains that are only noticed on benchmarks but not real life and in return all sorts of new failure modes and lack of flexibility. Since there is no possible combination of RAID on spinning disks that will even match a crappy SSD, I suggest the following: 1. Install a 1TB Samsung 960 M.2 as your boot/game SSD and dedicate your current slow SSD to VMWare. 2. Just dedicate 1 or more WD Blacks to the VMWare images. 3. Create a RAID-10 of 2 TB out of the 4 WD Blacks (Never use RAID-5 for performance) Atasas 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mindovermaster Moderator Posted March 25, 2017 Moderator Share Posted March 25, 2017 You could always use ZFS, and put them into separate pools... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+rdlenk Subscriber² Posted March 25, 2017 Subscriber² Share Posted March 25, 2017 If you are using Windows 8 or up you could use Storage Spaces to pool all of the disks. Won't work if you are trying to dual boot with a different OS though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts