I totally abhore W10. The only W10 I will use should be stripped to the bone , with all telemetry and bloat removed. I am in the process of creating that, by the use of a Windows Deployment Server, capturing and creating a custom ISO for computers at work. Will see. Now, I will use a HTPC distro and call it a day.
Sounds like a good plan amigo , i'm on W10 because we play games from the microsoft store and the wife use ms office on it sometimes .
Regular automatic network / NAS attached backups of important files will be fine for roughly 100% of folks. RAID 6 isn't as widely supported in the consumer sector, RAID 5 requires more drives than most people will desire to put into their HTPC, and even more drives than some cases have 2.5" / 3.5" bays. RAID 5 and 6 are great if you want to amass a bunch of HDD's and keep your data safe by basically having a server in your house. But if you go that far, you might as well spend the money on good internet and a good backup plan for off-site backup in the event misfortune finds your home. That said, thankfully HTPC users don't tend to create a ton of irreplaceable data, so a few USB sticks used in rotation should suffice. This however, is starting to go off-topic a bit. @chispy 500 GB is plenty to watch movies and play the occasional game on. Plus, if you DOSBOX, you can fit plenty of old MS-DOS games on even a few GB's of space. TANK WARS (the original WORMS clone from 1991) is still a ton of fun to this day, thankfully. I have 'only' 1tb NVME drive here, and over half a dozen 'on sale' brand 500gb SSD's for media and other things related to my project (and a little over 1gb in Steam games total). This is the 'daily driver' here so to speak so you should be just fine on an HTPC for quite a while provided you mind that 'disk space required' field on Steam. If your motherboard (I didn't check) has Sata ports your not using, you can always hook cheap 500gb SSD's to them and situate them 'somewhere' in the case using cable ties, or if low on space, get a m.2 to SATA drive adapter (2.5" shell) you can put several sata m.2 (not NVME!) drives in to save space. They make said shells in 3.5" and 2.5" space and it only requires 1 sata cable (though, you won't get the true max performance of the drives inside, you will get full capacity; please read the fine print / instructions thoroughly that come with the shell to avoid any caveats). Just make sure that when you buy one, if you buy one, you get one that has output to SATA and *NOT* almost identical-looking U.2 SFF-8369 which is an entirely different type of plug (even though to the casual user, they may never notice the key at where the sata data and power plugs meet, which only prevents regular sata from being plugged as it's a different pin-out / protocol). Something along the lines of what I was saying with the adapter (this is a 2.5 model, 3.5 models are bigger but you may not have that bay in your case always). https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-M-2-SATA-Adapter-S322M225R/dp/B076S9VK1M <~~~ that's the right type of adapter. Only listed this adapter so you know what to look for & so that if you're totally out of space and don't wish to use USB stuff, you have an idea of what's out there. You can sometimes find this cheaper and hence a better deal IF you've got the drives laying around you wish to house; but at 40$ you can start to get towards decent external USB drive territory - and you already have those ports. *EDIT: To clarify, you can get ones that support m.2 NVME, but that's somewhat pointless outside of edge-case scenarios as Sata protocol is much higher latency & has lower performing throughput (so try to avoid those, as they're a down-grade!). I wish you the best with your PC. Post back for questions/etc.
Hi there , thank you for the suggestion. I'm good to go already with my storage as i have 2x 1TB ssds onboard the deskmini + 512Gb of nvme OS + a dual hdd caddie from enermax with 2x 3TB hdd on it connected via usb 3.1 for the collection of old movies , old Music , family photos and videos. 8.5TB of storage is more than enough for me.
I remember a few years back when an Acer gaming laptop I had came with 2 NVMe SSDs in RAID0 out-the-box. Ended up tossing a SATA SSD in the array too since I had one lying around. Completely unnecessary and no real benefit in my case, but was pretty cool to be able to do it
I have both 2x 1tb raid 0 and 4x 2Tb raid 0 all with PCIe gen 4 disks, first gen m.2 OS: Win10pro latest version does it work? yes, is it faster? Depends, in some situations yes, others no. small file transfer, not great, big files and lots of them, heck yeah! the 2xR0 does 9gb/s in optimal conditions The 4xR0 will do 15gb/s on sunny days but it will drop off, you can only transfer so much for so long question you need to ask yourself, does it make a difference to what you will use your computer for? Is it worth it to you? for me, i am happy with it, I have one more 4x4x4x4 card to fill up It was built for a graphic workstation, but with many things during covid, it wasn’t meant to happen good luck
