BUILD IT
Super Storage Station
Building our own full-tower storage house
ZAK STOREY, EDITOR
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?
SO REALISTICALLY, unless you need super-fast storage, dropping $1,740 on SSDs might not be the smartest idea. In fact, there’s a few areas with this build where you can swap parts around, and interchange stuff to really tailor it to your specific requirements. For instance, if you want to make this a media-streaming build for your whole family, you might be better off getting a 24-core Threadripper, and a dedicated GPU with some solid 7,200 RPM HDDs. If you are looking to create a remote rendering station, then dropping storage capacity by half and investing in a lot more memory would go a long way. Want an ultimate gaming rig with a boat load of storage in the back? Then a Ryzen 9 5900X, AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, and 4TB of SSDs would be a perfect solution.