PC noob wanting to get into PC gaming

[Ganoncrotch]

Zkuq said:

Pemalite said:

They use different NAND and wear levelling mechanisms, so it's not Apple to Apples.
The controller tries to avoid writes as much as possible, so once it's worked out what stuff you use most frequently, it will be cached and minimal farther writes made.

As for SSD Cache drives, it's actually a better experience than an SSHD, I have a Sandisk Express Cache in another machine, the main advantage is the size of the SSD, which means more is aggressively cached. And boy can you tell the difference if the SSD cache is turned off. The NAND is also higher grade, faster.
And because the drives are fairly large, it can do better wear levelling to prolong life.

Ah, excellent points. Thanks!

Ganoncrotch said:

If you don't know anything about them RAID 5 is a very good way to make sure you never lose any information and it only comes at the cost of one harddrive , you can have it starting from 3 drives so if you have 3 1tb drives you end up with 2 terabytes of basically perfectly minded storage, if any one of the 3 drives dies you can just replace it and rebuild all your data, but you can expand raid 5 to include more drives and you'll always just be losing 1 drive worth of space.

It doesn't add anything performance wise for the drives though, but even for at home in pc use it comes at a small cost and gives you great data protection.

That sounds pretty good for protecting against data loss in hardware failure situations. I use an external HDD for all my valuable/storable data though (e.g. music, documents), so I'm not sure how RAID would work with that. I also imagine it's a lot less stressful for the disk if it's there for storage purposes only without need for constant reading and writing, so I would think it's going to last way longer than an internal disk. Also, these days if I want a backup solution, it had better protect me against randomware as well, and RAID doesn't do that, does it?

If you mean ransomware then no, if you have any drives on an effected pc, even if they are network mapped drives then some of the fuckers like kryptolocker and such will absolutely mangle all of your files. A raid offers zero protection from these it's basically just a harddrive to the PC and everything that allows can happen the only thing it does is in a raid 5 scenario it basically spreads the data over the 3 drives in a way that one of the 3 drives contains just a marker which can be used to restore the other drives info if lost, so over all 3 drives if you pull one drive out the information is all technically still there so one drive can physically die and you lose zero files

As for a removable drive getting less wear and tear it's true if you don't use that drive it will be saved from some of that, but at the same time if it's out in the open it has a chance to get effected by other things like just being knocked off a ledge or vibrations on a desk which will take a toll on the hardware too. at the end of the day, the only way you can save your data absolutely is to back it up somehow on 2 devices, then if one fails, make a new backup.