LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS
LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY
THE CONCEPT
OH BOY this is a big one. It’s one of those builds that you sort of plan out thinking, “Ah this will be easy, and affordable, and realistic,” and then you get to the end of requesting in all those parts and what you’re left with is a massive price tag. It happens more often than you’d think. Yep, if you take a quick glance over to that ingredients list to the right, you’ll see that our secondary storage of choice takes up a whopping 67 percent of our total budget. That’s nuts.
However, it does bring to light one perhaps obvious fatal flaw when it comes to a system build quite like this. As you can probably tell the concept behind this build is simple: To create a fantastically concrete media server, where we can store our future Maximum PC video content (planning for the new year, for when the HQ opens up and we get access to that dreaded digital format as part of this editor’s grand plans). But there’s one problem for the average Joe—that it is an insane amount of money to spend on storage.
The reality is, if you swap those out for just standard Western Digital Red Pro 4TB HDDs, you’d be looking at a price of around $600. That’s near enough a third of what you’d actually spend on those SSDs—crazy huh? SSDs have come a long way for sure, and their performance is undeniably in almost every metric, but they’re just nowhere near the same cost-effectiveness when it comes to mass storage and server setups like this.
PERFECT STORAGE?