 To start this build blog, Luke and I wanted to come up with the perfect symbol for how well we work together. We brainstormed and debated and eventually we decided... Peanut butter and jelly. And I think we all knew how that was going to end. So we were on our way back inside feeling dirty and a little ashamed when we realized the answer was staring us in the face all along. We go together like an SSD and a hard drive. The ultimate tag team. Alright, cheesy opening skit thing. Did you say cheese? Wow, no. Thank you. Aside, that all aside, the point of today's build blog, although this won't be news to anyone who's been watching our channel for the last couple of years, is some things like an SSD and a hard drive are just better together. So to educate people about this idea of SSDs and hard drives, being a match made in heaven like PB&J, WD launched their dream machine for good promotion on a couple of popular online communities. Getting members of AVS form and AV form to submit their ideas for a dream machine and then giving us the opportunity to draw a configuration from the dozens of submissions, build it and donate it to a local school to give the students there the tools that they need to develop their skills as videographers, photographers, digital artists, animators, you name it. So we drew Askin7's configuration and today Luke and I are going to build up that config that he or she submitted with a couple of small tweaks. We upgraded the motherboard to an X99 Deluxe due to availability of the one that he selected. Askin7's configuration was definitely one of the better balanced ones that struck a solid middle ground between some of the other configs that were either total dream machines that only made sense in dreams or super mundane rigs that wouldn't feel like we were really building an ultimate workstation for the students to use. We did end up making a couple of tweaks to the config so the motherboard had to be changed, I already mentioned that. The 4TB WD Green Storage Drive was upgraded to 2 brand spanking new 6TB models courtesy of WD for a total of 12TB of storage and the monitor was changed to a personal favourite of mine, the ASUS PB278Q because the one the post called for was a little bit over the top for our config. I really liked the choice of the Define R5 for the case. For a lot of gamers something flashier might have made more sense but even though this is definitely a capable machine for games, I mean it's got a GTX980 in it, the intended use is in a classroom so it should be extremely quiet and it shouldn't look super flashy with side panel windows and LED lights all over the place. I liked the choice of the Intel Core i7-5820K. If this was a gaming rig I might question the wisdom of spending the extra money on 6 processing cores and DDR4 versus a more practical quad core DDR3 machine but since it's much more likely to be used for content creation than 3D games, the extra couple of processing cores will save a lot of time in the long run for whoever is using it. 16GB of RAM might not seem like much right now but with the way DDR4 is going to drop in price over the next year or two, it made sense to go light on the RAM and then upgrade it later on down the road when the cost per capacity is much lower and when you're sure that the extra RAM is actually going to be used. Speaking of cost per capacity, our configuration includes a 512GB 850 Pro SSD and those two 6TB WD green drives that I mentioned before for mass storage. The 850 Pro is super fast and that's where we'll install the Windows 8.1 operating system but it's also a $500 drive for a mere half a terabyte of storage. Not really an appropriate price per gig for storing large video files or anything else that takes up a lot of space and doesn't directly benefit from the faster random reads and writes of an SSD. So that's where our hard drives come in. Each of these 6TB drives costs about half as much as that single 512GB SSD for 12 times as much storage each. So about 1 20th the cost per gig overall, actually a little bit less than that. So we'll store large programs here and they can also be divvied up amongst all the different students who work on the machine so that they all have enough space to store their projects without worrying about running out of room. But there are actually some little tricks to help you get the most out of an SSD and hard drive configuration. So for those of you at home, changing your default installation directories for programs like Steam, Origin and Uplay to the hard drive rather than to the SSD will save you the trouble of changing it every single time. You can also change things like your My Documents and My Videos folders to remap them to the hard drive and then Windows, every time you go and look for those folders, will automatically redirect you to your mass storage. You can utilize programs like Space Sniffer, a personal favorite, to keep your SSD space freed up. It gives you a nice little visual representation of everything that's on your SSD so you can figure out what you need and what you don't. And another little tip is when you're defragging, when you're running regular system maintenance, you do want to defrag your hard drive in order to get the sequential files as close together to each other as you possibly can versus having the little bits of them scattered all over the place, but never defrag an SSD. It's actually bad for it. A tip that's not specific to SSD and hard drive dual drive users is encrypting your drives. Windows security is pretty easy to break, but to protect your files, it's definitely worthwhile to encrypt things. And guys, these are just a few of the ways that you can keep your system optimized. If you have some specific questions, the best thing to do would be to direct you to the Linus Tech Tips forum thread linked in the video description, where you can actually ask any specific questions you have about how to make this process as seamless and painless as possible. WD is planning to have some of their technical folks in there answering questions for the next couple of weeks, so whether you're still working on your next system or you've already got a dual drive set up, you can drop your questions in there and they'll do their best to answer you. So check that out. Again, it's linked in the video description. So that's pretty much it for this build blog. Thanks to Askin7 and the rest of the folks who submitted PC configs for us to potentially build. Thanks to you guys for watching and thanks to WD for letting us be involved in this fun little project. Guys, like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment letting us know if you have any sort of, actually, I mean, hey, it might be a great place to also have some discussion about your dual drive setups. Also check the other link in the video description if you want to support us. You can buy a cool t-shirt like this one. You can give us a monthly contribution or you can change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code. So every time you're buying SSDs and hard drives, we get a small kickback. That kind of thing helps us out a lot. Thanks again for watching and as always, don't forget to subscribe. Pop that thing.