Solved First AMD Ryzen Threadripper Build - Drive Strategy?

Greetings all - I'm new to PC Help Forum.

I'm about to build my first AMD Ryzen Threadripper on an AsRock X399M micro ATX board.
The motherboard has space for up to 3 x M.2 SSD PCIe. Just looking for some advice on drive strategy? Should I have separate drives - one for OS + Apps and one for data?
I don't think I need much more than about 40 GB for OS + Apps, and about 300 GB for data. My plan is to buy a Samsung 970 Pro 512 GB for primary data storage, plus maybe a second SSD for backup . Or I could just have an external SSD on USB 3 for backup. The external drive would give me the option to take it off-site. I don't use any cloud services for backup.
In terms of OS and apps , I'm using Windows 10, MS Office, Visual Studio, Adobe After Effects, Media Encoder...
I'm not sure if I want or need the overhead of RAID.

The ASRock board has support for the following:

• 8 SATA3
• 2 Ultra M.2 (PCIe Gen3 x4)
• 1 Ultra M.2 (PCIe Gen3 x4 & SATA3)

MOTHERBOARD - ASROCK X399M
I think it's the only mATX board that supports Ryzen Threadripper

Bruce said:

welcome to the forum b4ip,

you're on the money on all fronts.
I'd not go down the RAID path, you aren't running any mission critical stuff and you seem all over the idea of backups.

yep, definitely get an SSD for the OS and Apps, and either another SSD or HDD for your data.
if you're worried about the HDD speed when accessing data, and budget permitting, of course go SSD, all I'd add is my OS and Apps are on a m.2 SSD and all data and media libraries are on a 3TB HDD and speed is just fine.

I'd not think a SSD is the best backup medium, again purely bang for buck.
let's face it, in an ideal world, you'll backup once a day/week/month (whatever your paranoia allows ) and theoretically never need it to restore (yeah right!) so why pay for a SSD.

the only RAID I ever use is on my NAS backup device. there it has saved my bacon when one drive has failed, just swap in another new drive and no data loss or down time.

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Thanks for your welcome and feedback. Touch wood, I've not had any data disasters since the mid 90's. I think I'll go with 2 x SSD for OS, apps and data, and an external drive for backup plus a USB 3 thumb drive as a second backup copy of critical project files to take off site.

gus said:

Do remember of course if you store your apps and OS on your SSD and your data on a separate mechanical hard drive you will lose some of the speed advantage you gained with the ssd because you will be limited to the speed of the data hard drive to retrieve your files, just saying. BTW it will be worse if you choose to allow your data hard drive to sleep too.

Would recommend you keep regularly accessed data on your main ssd. Forget raid for what you are doing, you would be much better off with backing up to an external drive as you plan, then depending of your level of paranoia make another external backup (or copy the first one) to another external drive. You could also alternate between backing up to the different drives if you only want 1 copy too. I am very paranoid since losing my business records some years back and nowadays back up to 3 separate nas boxes with 1 kept off site.

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A fellow Ozi, thanks for your feedback. I think you're right about not needing RAID. I think I'll go with 2 x SSD for OS, apps and data, and an external drive for backup plus a USB 3 thumb drive as a second backup copy of critical project files to take off site.

Thanks for the advice. Yes, can close this now.