Well, a NAS is a network drive, so you'd only be able to use that for storage, not as your main drive. You can't boot off it, that is. It wouldn't be internal either, if that's a concern. You'd always have some network-related latency, and honestly, I personally feel that internal storage trumps NAS any day. You can always share files with an ftp server if you need to. However, if a NAS fits your needs, then I guess I have no critique.

However, personal experience tells me that Western Digital provides high quality HDDs, both external and internal. For the NAS, I'd recommend going for a WD My Cloud Drive, and if you want an internal drive, you can have a look at the WD Black series. I found both on Amazon.com.

 

Crucial mx100 has the best specifications/cost ratio in Poland, not sure about situation in USA. Samsung 128GB was for me more expensive than Crucial 256GB, with similar read/save speed.

I bought it recently (256GB version, 128GB and 512GB are also available) and it works as advertised.

Usage of http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html may be by itself illegal and may cause your licence of Windows to turn void. Depends on stupidity of local laws and involved lawyers.

 

The drives marketed for NAS usage like the WD Red can be used outside a NAS(Network attacked Storage) too. They only have some extra functionality related to error conditions helpful for RAIDs used in NAS, maybe have slightly tweaked firmwares for different access patterns/power consumption/heat/noise and more guarantee/higher quality mechanics.

If you only want it as a silent backup drive no harm in going for such drives but you pay a little bit more than a WD Green. I have multiple WD Greens and Reds in some Synology NAS boxes and the Reds are my preferred choice.

 

Like mentioned above, you can easily use NAS-drives in your PC. As for the SSD, keep in mind that the 840 Pro is Samsungs high performance series, so by going for a Crucial MX100 you can save some money if you don't need that extra high performance (the difference is basically in higher write-speed, so if you plan to put your OS and frequently used programs on it a higher write-speed isn't really necessary apart from the first installation of the OS and the programs).

For the HDD's, if you want it as pure storage you can go with a WD Green instead of a WD Black, since again the Black series is for performance and you'll pay extra for that. An alternative to WD would be the HGST Deskstar. That drive should give better performance than the WD Green, although probably not as much as a WD Black (I don't really have any numbers for it so you might want to look for some benchmarks).

You should also check prices to see if buying two 2TB drives might be cheaper than simply buying a 4TB drive - you would also dodge some problems with it that some 4TB drives have (the WD Red 4TB for example seems to fail quite often whereas the 2TB variant doesn't have that problem). Buying two 2TB drives also gives you a little more protection against data loss - if one drive fails only half your data (if both drives were full) will be gone instead of all of it, so it's definetly worth thinking about.

 

Samsung 840 Pro SSD: I have the Samsung 840 EVO 250 GB. With OS optimization set for performance, over provisioning turned on, and using Rapid Mode, I'm left with 209 GBs after Win 8.1 separates two other hidden partitions from my C: drive.

Benchmarking with the Samsung Magician Software and Rapid Mode gives me these numbers: Sequential Read: 6913 MB/s
Sequential Write: 5676 MB/s
Random Read (IOPS) 193018
Random Write (IOPS) 109717

Of course, Rapid Mode isn't an ideal way to benchmark the HD, so I'll rerun the test after shutting it off (and turning off the computer).

With it turned off, I'm getting:

Sequential Read: 552
Sequential Write: 532
Random Read (IOPS) 96838
Random Write (IOPS) 70691

On the last two, just eyeballing the task manager as it is reading the random speeds, It falls about 450MB/s Read and 350 350MB/s in random. Atto Benchmark gives the same speeds once you hit 64KB of data being moved.





Here's my S.M.A.R.T. Info:



All in all, I'd say it's a great hard drive. Note, it's not exactly the same one you're looking at, but my EVO has been nothing but steady and fast. In Real Time, no matter what I do, my hard drive is never the chokepoint anymore.

 

RAPID uses your RAM, it's not exactly a benchmark of the SSD itself. NAS drives aren't worth the extra cost unless you fully expect to use them in NAS-like conditions (need TLER and you expect to pack them together tightly). If you want the most reliable consumer hard drives on the market, you should be looking at Hitachi (HGST) or Toshiba. As for SSDs, value choices would be Samsung 840 EVO/Crucial MX100 with performance choices being the Samsung 840 PRO/Samsung 850 PRO/Intel 530.

 

The reason I didn't recommend the 840 evo is that there was a bug discovered recently that makes the performance on files that are stored longer worse. More information about that bug here. While Samsung says that a patch will come in october, I wouldn't trust that 100% since delays can always happen so for the moment I would avoid the 840 evo series (however the 840 pro series doesn't suffer from the same bug).

Also, just like you said rapid mode benchmarks are pretty useless, since the benchmark includes the performance of your RAM that it uses as the cache to make it look better. The actual writing speed on the SSD doesn't change, and if you suffer a power loss all things that are in RAM and not yet written onto the SSD will be lost.

 

Thanks for the info.

I'd be surprised if it goes more than a month or two without a fix now that it's in the open. Beyond that, I try to make an image of my hard drive every night, along with saving most of my important docs in a cloud, anyway. So I'm not too worried about anything like that. Push comes to shove, I can just reimage and walk away for the twenty minutes it takes.

But you're right, to buy new, I'd wait to make sure this bug is fixed first.

Also, I set my word documents to autosave every minute to the cloud, so even if there's a crash, I shouldn't have to worry about it. Beyond which, if it is a concern, Rapid Mode can be turned off, and you're still getting almost the highest possible read/write speeds from a SATA6 connection possible.

And on that note, I also have a RAID 10 array in my case and am pretty happy with the speeds (200-250 MB/s read and write for anything over 16 Kb transfer) using 4 1TB 7200 RPM disks I'm almost of the mindset that a person should buy a smaller SSD and then go with a RAID 1, 5 or 10 (depending on the quality of motherboard) for redundancy and move the OS libraries to the RAID drive backing up to the cloud. Matter of fact . . . looks like I have my project for this morning.

 

If you're planning on buying two 2TB drives, you could set them up in a RAID 0 config. That can theoretically double your performance.

 

True, but if one of the drives fails all your data will be gone, so unless there are frequent backups I wouldn't recommend RAID 0.

Also I completely forgot to answer the second question. If you can get your Windows key extracted, then yes it should generally work if you don't change the Moherboard, since Windows is bound to that (probably by MAC address or something). You may have to use the activation by phone option, which should work if the normal one doesn't. However, I can't give you a 100% guarantee that it'll work, but normally it should.

 

I usually just use http://pcpartpicker.com/parts/internal-hard-drive/#t=5900,7200,10000,10025,10500,15000&qq=1&sort=a6 to compare mechanical hard drives. I don't think there would be much difference between the drives besides cost, speed, and warranty.

 

If performance is the issue, it's better to buy a smaller SSD for the system drive and then move your Doc, Pic, Downloads, etc., folders all to a second drive.

Or for more performance, buy two small SSDs and put them in a RAID 0 Config, and then drop in two more large disk drives in a RAID 1 for true redundancy.

 

NAS drives will work, no question about it. As I said before though, they're not worth the cost unless you specifically have them in a NAS-like environment so their advantages become apparent. If you can get them as cheap as normal branded drives, go ahead and get them.

Recommendations: as I posted earlier, Toshiba and HGST drives. The Toshiba DT01ACA300 (3TB) is ~US$108 + shipping at the stores I've looked at (B&H Photo Video, Newegg, Amazon).

What you've heard about 3-4TB drives is somewhat true - on certain chipsets there are firmware restrictions that prevent higher than 2TB drives from working at full potential because the chipset manufacturer wasn't forward thinking. This boils down to not having access to the full capacity IF your computer is very old. A fairly modern system within the last 5 years or so should have no issue with this. Performance will be the same or better than comparable 1-2TB drives as you'll have either the same or greater platter density.

In addition, a single larger hard drive will use less power, make less noise, and take up only one SATA connector compared to two smaller hard drives