Hard drive upgrades

One of the hard drives in my computer had been spitting out errors for a little while now, so over the weekend I revamped the storage in my computer. I’m also expecting the simulation work I’ll be doing for my PhD will require a decent amount of storage, so I picked up a couple 4 TB WD Blue hard drives from Newegg. They were a decent price, and brought my computer from a total of about 3 TB up to just over 10 TB of storage.

The failing drive (1 TB) got replaced, and I also took out an old 250 GB IDE drive that I was using as a place to temporarily dump files. That left a 1 TB drive, two 500 GB drives, and the 250 GB SSD.

After doing a bit of cable gymnastics in the case, the two new drives got installed and plugged in. Current configuration now has the SSD as the boot drive and root partition. I made the 1 TB drive my home directory, and decided to lump the 4 TB and 500 GB drives into a single LVM2 volume group for my primary storage. I considered a RAID 1 or 10 configuration, but with time and brain space constraints, a JBOD setup seemed like it would be easier. I might change my mind later on though.

If it turns out I need even more storage, the case still has one empty drive bay that I stick another drive into.