Samsung PM1643 SSD for the Obsidian 1000D Tower

[CountvonStafford]

Hello everyone. Since Kingdom Hearts was released for the PC, I started looking into PC gaming. I began poking around on Steam to see what they had and was amazed at what I had found (I even found games that I had during childhood such as Chicken Little and Cars). Needless to say, my Steam wishlist got fairly full real fast. It is currently at 91 games and that is not counting the ones that are going to bought us the bundle option on Steam. At first I was thinking of buying a prebuilt PC but a lot of people have said that custom building one is better. I came to agree with the custom build group (because you can add whatever you want to it) so I began looking at towers. I decided to go with a full size tower over a midsized one because it offers more customization options. I looked at different sites until I found Corsair (I cannot remember how, but I am glad that I did). So began looking at what they had to offer.
 

 

That is when I stumbled across the Corsair Obsidian 1000D and immediately decided that this is the tower that I want because it offers a lot of customization options and with space for five hard drives and six SSDs, I would not have to worry about space (there are a lot of games that I am looking to buy). I have not started the build or ordered any parts yet (I have to wait until I get the money). So I began looking at what hard drives and SSDs that I want to buy so I can have enough memory storage since that list of games is probably going to get bigger. I recently came across the Samsung PM1643 SSD which has almost 31 TB of storage. However, there is a problem. It is 2.5 inches as standard but from what I read, it is a lot thicker than your average SSD (the article from tech radar says it is far thicker than the standard 9.5 mm, though it does not specify by how much). I have a feeling that there is a really good chance that it will not fit and the price tag is over $8,000 (or £6,500). I want to double check before I even think of entertaining the idea of buying one let alone six.

[LeDoyen]

these are SAS drives, not SATA : Usually for servers only. If you want to use these on a PC you'll need to add a SAS controller.

But you'll be better off using several SATA drives of smaller size anyway, and buying as you need them 🙂

You'll most likely will be fine with a few NVME drives right on the motherboard for a while before you get the need to add SATA drives.

What we commonly do with big steam libraries is copying game files to storage drives,like regular spinning hard disks, maybe externally on a NAS to avoid having to download them again.

On the PC, you only keep the games you actually play, meaning you don't need massive storage in the case.

Whenever you want to play a game you previously downloaded, just manually copy the saved game files to the steam library folder in the PC, and start a file verification on steam. It will check the data (which takes only a couple of minutes) and download the occasional update.. then you're up and running.

The advantage of this is hard disks are a lot cheaper compared to SSDs of the same capacity. It saves you from having to buy huge and extremely expensive SSD that are fast enough for gaming.

[CountvonStafford]

1 hour ago, LeDoyen said:

these are SAS drives, not SATA : Usually for servers only. If you want to use these on a PC you'll need to add a SAS controller.

But you'll be better off using several SATA drives of smaller size anyway, and buying as you need them 🙂

You'll most likely will be fine with a few NVME drives right on the motherboard for a while before you get the need to add SATA drives.

What we commonly do with big steam libraries is copying game files to storage drives,like regular spinning hard disks, maybe externally on a NAS to avoid having to download them again.

On the PC, you only keep the games you actually play, meaning you don't need massive storage in the case.

Whenever you want to play a game you previously downloaded, just manually copy the saved game files to the steam library folder in the PC, and start a file verification on steam. It will check the data (which takes only a couple of minutes) and download the occasional update.. then you're up and running.

The advantage of this is hard disks are a lot cheaper compared to SSDs of the same capacity. It saves you from having to buy huge and extremely expensive SSD that are fast enough for gaming.

Could a standard external drive work for storage?

[LeDoyen]

Any big storage can work yes.

You could use internal storage too. Hard drives are noisy so that's why i mentionned a NAS (or any external storage).

You can still go the SSD route, or take a lot of HDD inside the case and manage all in the PC itself. Some cases like the Fractal define 7 XL can hold like 16 hard drives (if you can connect all of them :p) but in use, you may find that overkill.

But whatever solution you go for, it's always best to wait until you need extra storage to see what solution finally best suits your needs.

Even with a huge list of games on your steam account, you may not download all of them. from those you download, you may mostly play a certain number of them, and need to store away less game files than you anticipated.

 

What i'm trying to say is maybe wait to better see the need to chose the solution. and if you have a fiber connexion, downloading a big game is a matter of minutes anyway, so if you have that, you may not need to keep the whole steam library locally.

 

As for external storage, an external drive is the simplest but maybe not the most evolutive one. Out of free space ? buy another drive etc.. and it may not be easy to keep track of what games are in what drive. But there's no setup to do, just plug, search, copy, unplug, done.

With a multi-bay NAS, you can add drives as you need more space. Depending on how you set it up, all the mass storage is seen as one big drive that you can expand as needed. If you run out of space, just add a drive, and the NAS will add it to the storage pool, making your one storage bigger.

You can have the storage available in windows explorer as a network drive, so moving files is very convenient, and no need to look in the drawers for the right disk. And.. you can have the NAS spinning in another room so your gaming roo stays quiet without a bunch of HDDs whizzing next to you. Nowadays, most gaming motherboard have 2,5gb ethernet so, transfers are fairly fast too.

 

So there are lots of solutions. all are valid, depending on the real need, but cost varies a LOT for the same storage space:

SAS controller with huge server class SSDs (very fast and convenient, but extremely £££££)

External USB hard drives (not very convenient but very simple, more affordable)

A bunch of internal HDDs (noisier, but more affordable as you don't need USB cases with the drives)

NAS storage (evolutive, silent if you install it away from your PC, very convenient, but there's the cost of the NAS to factor in along with the drives + some network wiring maybe. And needs a bit of hands on experience to learn how it works if you never used one.)