Hard Drive Advice...

[NOTNlCE]

I suppose this is the appropriate forum for this...

Recently, I have migrated systems from my 2008 Mac Pro to a new X99 custom built desktop. And now, with all the space the full tower gives me, my hard drive setup isn't quite ideal any longer. Now that Windows works well on my system (was having issues with my 3,1 - one of the reasons I sold it) I am finding myself using it more and more.

Previously, I had my drives set up as follows:
1.12TB Fusion Drive for OS X (128GB SSD and 1TB HDD in Logical Array)
1TB WD Black for Windows 8.1 (shipped with a 2010 Mac Pro, brand new however, recently replaced under Apple Care)
2TB G-Drive for massive file storage and Time Machine backups for OS X.

Now, I would prefer to set up my drives in the following order, but I feel wasteful doing so, and I'm wondering if anyone has recommendations.

128GB SSD for Windows, 1TB drive for Games.
NEW 256GB m.2 SSD for OS X
1TB HDD for shared documents/music/pictures/common files between Windows and OS X, most likely formatted in exFAT, unless something else would work better? I have a license for NTFS for Mac, so that would be another option.
Keep the 2TB for storage/Time Machine backups. Windows 8 isn't critical to my workflow, and I have redone the install probably 10 times in the last few months, so if the drive dies, it's far from the end of the world. Probably won't need backups for that, but if I do, I have many drives lying around. Might just throw one in a spare bay for the heck of it.

Appreciate any feedback - you guys are always a great help here.
Thanks.
-N

EDIT:

Well, I've gone ahead and done it, and I am very pleased with the setup. iTunes functions exactly the same way in OS X and Windows, which is awesome. Downloads/Documents/etc. shared between OS's.

 

[FrtzPeter]

I had a MacBook Pro and Scannerz (http://scsc-online.com/Scannerz.html) caught some errors with it. Being that the drive is old, like 5 or 6 years I didn't even want to fool with trying to repair or recondition it, especially with drives only costing tens of dollars.

This is a 2.5" drive but I think this information may be of value anyway. I got one of the new line of Hitachi drives and was utterly amazed at how fast it was. Hitachi has recently nearly tripled the data density on the drive, so when it reads a track of data it's getting nearly 3 times as much out of it, which means it's nearly three times as fast. I saw another post about the same thing somewhere and that guy was getting data rates approaching something like 1 Gb/sec. Definitely not SSD speeds, but definitely faster than any other HD I'd seen.

I'd think Hitachi would have a 3.5" version of the drive, and I'd assume it would be even faster. This is a new line, as in started in 2014. I guess one way to make sure it's the new high speed drives would be to check the data density on the specs.