#btw there's a megapost about how to torrent that's been sitting in my drafts for a while

[eggman-is-fat-mkay]

Also: if your PC case has space for them, and your mobo has ports for them, it is better to buy many smaller hard drives than one large one, and set them up in something called a RAID array. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (the I was later changed to Independent) and its purpose is, in essence, to take a bunch of hard drives connected to the same computer (most RAID controllers also require them to be the same size) and treat them like one big one. Key features of RAID include better performance (each file is stored across all of the drives, so when accessing them, you get the combined access speed of all of the drives in the array), and, more importantly, redundancy. There are several RAID configurations available. If you set up your array in a RAID-5 configuration (requires at least 3 drives), your total capacity will be all of the drives added together except one (i.e. four 5TB drives would get you a total of 15TB), and you have one-failure redundancy. This means that if one of the hard drives fails, all of your data will be intact, and you can simply replace it with another hard drive of the same capacity, wait a few days for the array to "rebuild", and it'll be as though nothing happened. If a second drive fails before you replace the first one, or before the rebuild finishes, though, your data is toast. If you set your drives up in a RAID-6 configuration (requires at least 4 drives), you'll have the sum of all of them minus two, and you'll have two-failure redundancy. If you're truly paranoid, you can use RAID-1 (aka "mirrored" -- at least 2 drives), where you only get the capacity of a single drive no matter how many you have, but all of them can fail except one and all of your data will be intact. If you use RAID-0 (aka "striped" -- at least 2 drives), you'll get the capacity and performance of all your drives put together, but if any of them fail, all is lost, so make sure you're backed up. (You won't be expected to remember all that, by the way. When you're setting up your RAID, you'll be asked to pick one of those options, and then you can forget about it forever.) RAID-5 (one drive redundancy) is the most popular and the one I recommend.

While hardware RAID controllers do exist and are common, the more popular option nowadays, especially for consumer setups, is software RAID, since it's cheaper (comes with the OS) and more feature-filled, and unless you have more hard drives than SATA ports to plug them into, there's no real advantage to the hardware stuff. All four of the major operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux, and BSD) have software RAID functionality built in. (Linux even has more than one.) You'll need to delete all existing partitions off of a drive before setting it up in a RAID array, so if you have any existing data, you'll need to copy it somewhere else first.

Also worth noting is that while any RAID system will let you replace a drive with one of the same capacity, very, very, very few allow you to change the number of drives in of an array after initial creation, short of deleting and re-creating the entire RAID array along with all the data on it. Of the dozen or so RAID systems I've encountered, hardware or software, I'm only aware of two that support adding drives willy-nilly: BTRFS (a Linux-exclusive filesystem with software RAID built-in, and one of three ways to do software RAID on Linux) and BeyondRAID (a proprietary system developed by the company Drobo and used exclusively in their user-friendly USB storage controllers). Of those two, everyone you talk to online will tell you BTRFS is great as long as you don't use the RAID feature, for reasons that don't entirely make sense to me (they'll encourage you to use ZFS's software RAID instead, which doesn't support that), and Drobo boxes are notoriously quirky and unreliable. In short, none of the big-name ones let you add capacity because it's really hard to implement that without making a gigantic mess. If you want to add capacity down the road, you're either going to have to live with five drives in a RAID array and one all on its own as a separate drive letter, or you're going to be going down some very deep google rabbit holes, and quite possibly taking advantage of your local computer store's return policy to have drives you can temporarily copy all your data to.

Oooh im a new anon what brand/kind of memory i should get to start storing data? Like vids n movies

For brands: Seagate or Western Digital. Don’t drive yourself crazy like I did researching for days which is objectively “better” — they are both very solid and reliable brands, and the fact is that you can have a good or bad experience with either based on factors outside of anyone’s control. Hard drives fail — it’s a fact. There’s no way to permanently prevent this. Sooner or later your hardware will wear down, even from the best manufacturers, and all you can do is plan ahead of time for getting the longest life out of your drives by properly caring for them and have something planned to replace them when they inevitably fail. Hopefully after you’ve gotten some years of good use out of them first, but like I said there’s tons of factors.

For example, I ordered a 12 terabyte HDD from Seagate once for my server that was over $300 and it was dead on arrival. Wouldn’t work at all. But the warranty was for several years and customer service replaced it no problem and the 5+ other hard drives I’ve gotten from Seagate have been flawless. But sometimes, drives just die. You feel me?

But yeah, WD or Seagate. I’ve used both. Both are highly recommended

What kind: to keep things basic, you should consider either an HDD (hard disk drive) or SSD (solid state drive). For stuff you just want to back up and make sure it’s safe/you have copies, like videos and movies, pictures, music, documents, etc… you can go with an HDD. They are much cheaper, and ideal for storing files that aren’t accessed or modified frequently.

An SSD is going to be more expensive, and those are ideal for things like applications, games, your operating system….stuff that you interact with in real time, where loading time really matters and files can be being cached and changed and modified a ton within a short period of time. In this case, an SSD will feel significantly better and faster than an HDD

Hope this helps! Lemme know if I can answer anything else for ya