High capacity internal storage?

I have been looking around and I want more than 1.5TB internal storage in my m17xr4.

Any suggestions SSD's would be nice, but am not in the market for 2x$2000 1TB SSD's (not happening)

 

You no pay $4000? Then you SOL!

The "best" (i.e. most cost efficient) way of getting the most storage out of your system is to leave the SSD boot drive in. Then remove the optical drive and put an ODD to HDD caddy in it's place and put in a pair of HDDs to run in RAID 0. That's what I use. I have a pair of 750GB WD Scorpio Black drives running in RAID 0 in my R2. If I were to need more storage (god willing) I would upgrade the drives to the WD 1TB Scorpio Blues or a pair of Samsung 1TB drives. If your only using the hard drives for storage, then you shouldn't need SSDs for speed.

 

What will you be using the storage for?

For frequent write commands, aka torrents and lots of downloads, SSD's wouldn't be a very smart choice (not to mention you'd be insane to spend 4000 dollar's on storage).
Also if you have an R2, raid0-ing any recent SSD is pointless, a sATA3 ssd will already give you pretty much the maximum possible speed on an R2, as the R2 is sATA2. Raid0 I believe will not net you any performance gain, or at least hardly noticeable. For an R3 or R4 this wouldn't be the case, as they can attain higher speeds.

I'd suggest keeping an SSD in bay0, and a big normal 7200 or 10000rpm hard drive in bay2.
You could also do the other suggestions, remove the dvd drive and use 2 normal hard drives in raid0, but that's a personal thing, I for one find it quite convenient to have a dvd/bluray drive... ^^

You already have a 1.5 to 2tb single hdd drive which fits your alienware for 100-150$.

 

I need to be able to process folders of 1000 x 36mp NEF files as fast as possible in NX2 or CS6 in batch jobs and edit hours of 1080p MTS files while on the road where I don't have a hex core tower w/ 64gb of ram available

 

Damn.

I would go with the same setup I have then. The 750GB WD Scorpios will be cheaper than a pair of Samsung 1TB HDDs. Unless you really do need a full 2 TB of space. Then you may need to think about getting an external hard drive instead.

 

3x 750gb in raid0 should do the trick with msata being os drive. It will help with both storage and speed. Not as good as a Ssd but still better than a 5400rpm 1tb chugging along slowly.

If i am understanding correctly about what you do, then raid0 does cause issue with data integrity and backup. But if you got the equipment to shoot those NEF files, then you would be shooting on dual cards and it should not be a problem to carry 2x external hdd's for backup. That gives you dual backup for raw files (card + single external hdd) and single backup for edited data (single external hdd).

I am coming from similar background, personal record 8k NEF files in single 14hr day ;-)

 

Oh, that's right, you've got an R4. I kept thinking R3 for some reason.

One heck of a photographer there. :thumbsup:

RAID 0 shouldn't cause any headaches with backups as long as you don't try and convert the data into some special file format. That's what I've learned over the years, not to use any special backup software but to just drag and drop files as they are. That way I'm not screwed if a backup archive has been failed or corrupted. But remember, RAID 0 on it's own does not give any protection. It's just a way to convert a series of HDDs into one big striped volume. If one disk fails, the whole volume fails, so backup your irreplaceable files often. I converted my RAID 0 volume to a software RAID 0 volume here 6 months ago. I really didn't need the performance increase and I didn't want to worry about what would happen if something went bad with my SATA controller in my R2. The choice is your though. But for the record I haven't had any RAID 0 volume go bad on any of my systems before (5 RAID 0 volumes to date).

 

I have ordered an 8 bay NAS for the network as the main backup and I have an external BDXL burner now. the BDXL discs will be stored off site.

 

$1000 NAS is always a viable solution.

But seriously. If you need the standalone space on your R4 then go with the 3 x 750GB WD Scorpio Blacks in RAID 0 (provided you have your mSATA running as your boot partition).

 

Although I am in no place to say it (have 2x hotway 8x bays and a 2xN40L's), NAS is not always the solution.

Also it doesn't solve the issue of internal storage, I am still contemplating getting a M18x and throwing in 4x 750gb 7.2K drives.

If you don't mind me asking, where are you getting bdxl media from? I have tried everywhere locally (aus) but can't find any

 

I can't get BDXL discs locally here either in the US, but I can get them off of Amazon or:

100GB BD-R XL Printable Blu ray Discs

I was going to buy their panasonic slot load BDXL burner to put inside the M17xR4, but decided to external and not mess with the laptop over usb 3.0

I called digistor and the seemed legit, the guy spend 45 minutes on the phone with me. I believe allot of the people on here that replace their factory drives buy from digistor unless they have a better place closer.

 

Digitor has alright prices on media but BDXL media is still too expensive for me

BD-R are alright but I pay $14.50 for 10 pack BD-R printable locally, so no point going to Digitor for me.

Lucky for me, since Photography is not my bread and butter, I don`t need proper archived backups and my stack of HDD's+external sata dock are keeping me fine for backups

And I was able to snag a pair of brand new Dell Oem Bluray burners for my M17x for $80each off another forums

 

Buy 4 of these:
HGST 1TB Travelstar 2.5" Mobile Hard Drive 0S03563 B&H
$360

Then, add this to your DMC slot: Amazon.com: StarTech.com 2 Port Mini PCI Express Internal SATA II Controller Card MPEXSATA22I: Electronics
$46

Put them into a quad RAID0 array. 4.0tb x 7200rpm each! Put #1 in HDD0, put #2 in HDD1, put #3 & #4 into the optical bay, ditch the optical drive.

Buy one of these:
Crucial 128GB m4 mSATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive CT128M4SSD3 B&H
$120

Use it as your OS drive.

Optional, buy this:
Amazon.com: Syba mSATA SSD to 2.5-Inch SATA Adapter (SY-ADA40050): Computers & Accessories
$12

Wire the unused SATA port from the optical to this card and pick up another 128gb MSATA SSD, then combine the two into a 256gb dual RAID0 SSD array.
$120

You'll be running dual RAID0 array, at 256gb for OS and a 4.0tb quad RAID0 array for your data.

6 drives total!! Total cost = ~$660 + misc sata cables and power splitters

If I had the $$$, I'd do this!