PC Building

[bwest60]

Most new cases do not have enough space for my custom build. A lot of the games I play are on their own hard drive and with space to add mods for custom play. First, I had to find a motherboard with at least 2 PCI x16 slots and at least 6 SATA ports. I have a PCI x16 add-on card that has 8 more SATA ports. Various hard drives sizes 5) 3.5, 6) 2.5 and DVD drive.  The case I went with Phanteks Enthod Pro and it has 3) 5.25 bays and 6) 3.5 bays. ICY DOCK 6 x 2.5 SSD to 5.25 Drive Bay for my 6) 2.5 hard drives. What started out to be a gaming deck top is my Home Entertainment Center with over 30 terabytes of storage. Power requirements are done with a 1000 power supply. 

[rtbh99]

hey nice case, the enthoo pro is what my husbands pc is currently built in. only two hdds installed though lol

[BigAl01]

I’m curious about why you want to use so many separate drives.  Can’t you partition a few larger drives into smaller ones if you want to keep them isolated for each game?  It makes sense for something like an 8 TB HDD, but you can also partition smaller 2TB SSD devices.  There are even PCIe adapters with multiple M.2 sockets on them if money is plentiful.

[johnnyenglish]

O would go with @BigAl01 suggestion.

Less performance lost, keep in mind that if you use too many Nvme, or the second pci slot, PCI e lanes will have to be shared. A nvme rated at 7000 will see its speed rating slashed in half with 2x lanes instead of 4x lanes.

As for ssd goes, some boards will deactivate SATA ports if you use some m.2 slots. 

Conclusion, lots of drives is good if you go down the RAID path.

I believe the Ryzen has 24lanes which will be in most cases divided this way. 16x GPU 4x Nvme 4x chipset

Good building 

[bwest60]

I have my operating system on a M.2 and the reason why I put my games on different hard drive is for speed loading and one of the games I play has already taken up 500 gigabytes on the drive. I add mods to games and sometimes they work and other times they don't and adding and deleting files it is easy to corrupt the drive. My music and video drive 748 gigs. I downloaded most of my library to my computer and now I can watch and listen without looking for a disc.