Wise move, my friend, wise move.

Replacing the 2TB Firecuda with the 4TB WD Black

Ok, the Seagate Firecuda 530 2TB was replaced with the WD Black SN850X 4TB.

Since I was going to do this with the PC tower in a vertical position (the backside of the Helios case is also a glass panel which I did not feel like removing) I first padded the PSU cover with napkins, to prevent a screw getting lose and falling right into the interior of the ROG Thor PSU.

The WD comes with the latest firmware version (had to install WD/SanDisk Dashboard to make sure) which is a plus given that previous firmware versions had issues with the drive randomly disconnecting (yes, I did my homework first so I knew about this issue with older firmware versions, fixed now).

Benchmark numbers vs the previous Firecuda 530 are nothing to write home about but then again I don't really care as I only use this drive to store games. The real gain is in the capacity, 4TB of the WD vs the 2TB of the Firecuda (and the fact that data through output doesn't slow to truly abysmal levels as data gets stale).

Temperature when idle is a "frosty" 50C (about the same as the other NVMe drives).

So at this point the system in terms of storage consists of:

1. 960GB Intel Optane 905P PCIe NVMe (system drive)
2. 2 TB Samsung Evo 970
3. 2 TB Samsung Evo 970 (#2), both NVMe EVO drives installed on the DIMM.2
4. 2 TB Samsung 980 PRO
5. 4 TB WD Black SN850X
6. 1 TB T-Force SATA SSD (empty)
7. 2 TB Samsung T7 Touch external USB drive
8. 4 TB Western Digital hard disk to store old backups, etc.

Now up to basically 14 TB of sweet, sweet, flash storage.