ME chests, ME drives, storage busses - pros and cons?

[Shabazza]

If you are building your storage system with Applied Energistics in SSP or SMP,
which storage technique do you use the most? And why?

I like ME drives, because they are compact and easy to setup and manage. The costs for the drives are negligible and the storage cells are not cheap, but also not too expensive for what storage capacity they offer. Well, crafting the bigger ones is a bit tedious if no autocrafting is in place.
And if playing in SMP, you can take them out of the drives and store them in a strongbox or similar before logging off to secure your items against griefing.

I don't know any apparent advantage of ME chests over ME drives. So I never use ME chests.
They use up more space and can only hold 1 storage cell. Plus you need cables to connect them.
And storage busses have the disadvantage that you need a chest attached. This means, to get a nearly similar storage capacity like the smallest storage cell (1k), you would already need a diamond chest which is somewhat expensive.
So I only use them for connecting DSUs to store inferior items like cobblestone, dirt ect.
Some advantage may be the fact that items in normal chests with storage busses attached are "real".
If your power fails for some reason or a creeper decides to detonate next to your disk rack for some reason, you would be better off with a spatially distributed storage system than a single magic block.
Yeah, there are also blast resistant ME drives available with extra cells. But you know what I mean.
But in SMP using normal chests seems like a risk for me if your base is not located at 10k/10k within a natural mountain...

What's your opinion about this?

 

[rhn]

If you are building your storage system with Applied Energistics in SSP or SMP,
which storage technique do you use the most? And why?

I like ME drives, because they are compact and easy to setup and manage. The costs for the drives are negligible and the storage cells are not cheap, but also not too expensive for what storage capacity they offer. Well, crafting the bigger ones is a bit tedious if no autocrafting is in place.
And if playing in SMP, you can take them out of the drives and store them in a strongbox or similar before logging off to secure your items against griefing.

I don't know any apparent advantage of ME chests over ME drives. So I never use ME chests.
They use up more space and can only hold 1 storage cell. Plus you need cables to connect them.
And storage busses have the disadvantage that you need a chest attached. This means, to get a nearly similar storage capacity like the smallest storage cell (1k), you would already need a diamond chest which is somewhat expensive.
So I only use them for connecting DSUs to store inferior items like cobblestone, dirt ect.
Some advantage may be the fact that items in normal chests with storage busses attached are "real".
If your power fails for some reason or a creeper decides to detonate next to your disk rack for some reason, you would be better off with a spatially distributed storage system than a single magic block.
Yeah, there are also blast resistant ME drives available with extra cells. But you know what I mean.
But in SMP using normal chests seems like a risk for me if your base is not located at 10k/10k within a natural mountain...

What's your opinion about this?

ME storage bus, drives and chests have all different strengths for different jobs. For bulk storage, then yet the drives are probably to be preferred. But that doesn't mean there aren't tons of opportunities to use the others if you are a bit imaginative. For example use ME chests for non-formatted disks to get better overview, storage bus on item deletion methods working using priority.

Here is a simple example of how I set up my ME network:
http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/thr...and-guide-collection.42664/page-2#post-587528
There are also lots of examples of me using ME chests and ME storage bus in the rest of that thread.


I would guess your problem with seeing the point in the chest/storage bus might be based in the problem that you are not realising the true value of ME, and simply just dumping lots of unformatted disks into drives.

 

[ratchet freak]

with a chest you can inspect individual cells (only useful if you care about how stuff is sorted)

you can also use a filing cabinet with a storage bus (for bees)

a storage bus can also be used to connect to a subnet

 

[Iluvalar]

The storage bus are best for early _sorting_ system. I was using it a lot in previous versions for that. While it can't hold the same 1k of storage, a simple iron chest can hold quite a decent amount of different types for the very cheap cost. If you redirect the bulk of your cobble, sand, gravel, etc in barels , the remaining of your storage is limited mostly by types and not by capacity at that point.

I say "in previous version" because since the NEI integration I'm using AE as soon as possible as a _crafting_ system. I scavenge what I need to make most craft in my previous chest system. I end up using my AE system before I have the ressource to hold everything in it. Because of that, I invest in a quick and dirty itemduct "stuffing" sorting system with chest earlier in game and I end up jumping the phase where storage bus are in the right price/efficiency range. When I'm out of that "crafting" period, I have enough ressource to throw all the content of my old chest in drive without carring about type anymore.

 

[netmc]

Using all 3 along with some overflow configurations can lead to some very nice automatic level controls without resorting to spamming export busses and level emitters. Rhn's thread has a lot of good setup instructions. I wish I had done that with my AgS play through. It would make a few things far simpler now.

I have thought about going back through my ae network and reconfiguring all the storage busses to do this configuration, but it would be a lot of work at this point. I will probably do it on my next world however.

 

[Shabazza]

For example use ME chests for non-formatted disks to get better overview, storage bus on item deletion methods working using priority.

Yes, the overview of an individual cell is sometimes helpful. This is something that annoys me from time to time if I only have the type and byte count of a non-formatted cell,
but no idea what's really stored on it.

I would guess your problem with seeing the point in the chest/storage bus might be based in the problem that you are not realising the true value of ME, and simply just dumping lots of unformatted disks into drives.

Actually no. I use pre-formatting alot to not waste big disks with 63 item types but only a couple of items of each type.
I only use smaller disks unformatted to store items where I never will have more than a couple of dozens of. I like to keep things organized.

 

[rhn]

Actually the ME chest also have one other feature that can be useful: You can pipe/duct/whatever items directly into it(but not out of). You could for example use this to overwrite the storage location of the items if you wanted to, or use it like a ME interface that just stores the items locally and allows you access to them at the same time. Have plans to try and use this together with the ME export bus+Level emitter autocrafting "stockkeeping" setup, so that the items are stored locally where the export bus inputs them. This hopefully prevents the setup from starting up making more items when I exchange disks(storing the auto stock items) or cuts cable connections.

 

[Tylor]

I usually start AE by making storage interfaces to all my wooden chests. Then I migrate to memory cells - formatted 16k for numerous stuff, 1k for the rest.

 

[Launcelot_J]

Storage cells in ME drives are the best. I prefer DSU's for ingots/ores as well. I store the rest of my items in expandable storage cells (extracells). To solve the creeper problem, put a vaccum hopper into a obsidian chest next to ME drive. Also, always have backup energy cell on hand for power.

 

[Shabazza]

I switch to AE asap by using some unformatted 4k disks to get rid of my chests.
Usually I have not more than 4 or 5 normal chests when starting the first tiny ME system.
Whenever an item exceeds about 2k-3k units, I move it to it's separate pre-formatted disk.
But like I said, I never touched ME chests until now.

 

[Elmazz]

I started playing around with AE on agriarian skies alot So i use drives, storage busses connected to the barrels with stuff that I dont want to be in the drives (like cobble, bones, FLESH)... Never used me chest mainly coz it sounds stupid


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[immibis]

Why would you use a barrel for bulk items? Use a formatted cell (64k = ~half a million items) or a DSU.

 

[rhn]

Why would you use a barrel for bulk items? Use a formatted cell (64k = ~half a million items) or a DSU.

I agree, but I think people are doing it due to the slight save in materials they can get with it early on. A ME storage bus + Jabba/Factorization barrel is after all slightly cheaper than a 1k disk and can be upgraded to store more. But I by far prefer the versatility of the disks.

 

[Elmazz]

im making a 16m drive right now, so im just waiting


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[rhn]

im making a 16m drive right now, so im just waiting


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Personally find the Extra Cells disks(not the fluid ones) completely pointless. I simply cannot imagine a situation where I would want to store more than half a million items of a single kind...

I have on many occasion used something like 64k cobble on terraforming projects(when landscape near base wasn't perfect or wasn't "natural" enough), but half a million+??.

It can only be a case of "I haz xxxxx items stored, be amazed" IMO.

 

[immibis]

Personally find the Extra Cells disks(not the fluid ones) completely pointless. I simply cannot imagine a situation where I would want to store more than half a million items of a single kind...

I have on many occasion used something like 64k cobble on terraforming projects(when landscape near base wasn't perfect or wasn't "natural" enough), but half a million+??.

It can only be a case of "I haz xxxxx items stored, be amazed" IMO.

Or a case of "crap, my 64k drives are filling up with diamond blocks, better get more space".

When you don't realise you're playing with OP mods, anything is possible.

 

[rhn]

Or a case of "crap, my 64k drives are filling up with diamond blocks, better get more space".

When you don't realise you're playing with OP mods, anything is possible.

That is when the deletion method using priority I linked above comes in handy. Once your drive(which size you chose as the amount of items you predict is the maximum you could ever possible need) gets full, anything else just gets deleted(My method of choice is IC2 recyclers as I can use the scrap/UU-matter to make other items I might need).

But I would probably have stopped mining/farming/whatever for that particular resource before that, usually controlled by level emitters.

 

[DepressivesBrot]

Storage busses have a full double chest worth of slots for item formatting, which makes them a great tool to deal with the insane number of ores in a pack like Monster if you process all your ores right away and keep your ore buffer from ever filling up completely.

 

[rhn]

Storage busses have a full double chest worth of slots for item formatting, which makes them a great tool to deal with the insane number of ores in a pack like Monster if you process all your ores right away and keep your ore buffer from ever filling up completely.

Indeed, the 54 slots of the storage bus is really handy compared to the 8 of a export bus. But yeah you need to make sure you got your priority right and never under any circumstances get ores(or whatever is the case) deposited anywhere else. Kinda wish there was a slot update for export bus' for this reason.

 

[malicious_bloke]

I never delete anything from my disks other than the mostly broken weapons and crappy armour dropped by mobs in my mob grinder (and even then it's only because they don't bloody stack).

And since my usual endgame ME setup is distributed across multiple dimensions, I need singularities, for which I need to condense a literal bumload of items. So it's kind of handy to have a comically oversized storage system.