I am new to 3D and am curious about the storage system you all use to structure projects and assets in terms of both hardware and software. I’d like to come up with a storage system that won’t bottleneck workflow and has space to spare.
I’m researching a new PC build for rendering short animations and stills with Blender 2.8 and Cycles. Fellow Blender artist @birdnamnam was kind enough to come up with this build (https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gVJfhg) given my hardware criteria.
How many drives and what type of drives are you running? Do you projects and assets exist on a drive separate from the OS? Do your drives all exist in your PC enclosure or are you accessing the data from an external device?
This list is a base on which you can build your final configuration. I’ve just put the basic OS/apps drive. You can add 1 or 2 drives for storage, short or long term. For short term storage, I would personally pick a classic sata ssd with 2TB capacity, now that ssd’s are still cheap (there are some rumors about ssd prices going up in 2020, some say that the increase could be over 40%). You could pick something like this: https://pcpartpicker.com/product/nF8j4D/crucial-mx500-2tb-25-solid-state-drive-ct2000mx500ssd1
When I say short term storage, I mean files that are likely to be used on a regular bases (like textures, SP files etc) and need to be transferred quickly to the main OS drive when working on projects.
For long term storage, ex. for old projects, one could use a cheaper high capacity hdd (or 2 of them in a raid config), like this one https://pcpartpicker.com/product/bM97YJ/hitachi-4-tb-35-7200rpm-internal-hard-drive-0b36040