Game Storage considerations

N

nintari

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 29, 2001
Messages
1,792
So, I am at the point where I am looking to upgrade my Game storage on my main rig (in sig below) to get a bit more speed out of it. My situation is different though. I like to have ALL of my games installed and ready to go a sI never know what I want to play when the mood hits, and I don't feel like waiting hours for it to download. My steam library has close to 600 games, Origin over 25 games, uplay about 10 and then of course older retail titles.

Right now I have 2x 480GB SSDs in RAID 0 and typically use that for the main OS, main programs and etc. The secondary 3TB WD Green was used for my steam library. Originally I seen a good improvement in loading times on some games, but not all. Hence the reason why I kept most of the games on the slower drive.

SSD sizes and prices have not arrived at the point yet where I could just go all SSD. For 3 1TB drives I could upgrade to two GTX 980 cards lol

so I was looking to see what was out there and don't see too many reviews of mechanical HDDs anymore. I found one for the newer WD Black 4TB drive and the numbers look impressive, however I was looking more so at going with two of the 2TB drives in RAID 0 but don't see any numbers out there for the 2TB variant. What I planned on doing was keeping a backup of the RAID 0 put away and every so often backing up to it when a new game Is purchased and installed.

The newer WD Black drives however seem to be getting hammered on by users for their reliability, seems they tend to fail relatively quick.

So, is anyone on here doing what I am looking to do? Should I possibly look at a 256GB SSD and use a 3 or 4TB single drive and tie them together (the SSD as the cache drive for frequently used games). Should I go the RAID 0 router instead?

Again just getting ideas and planning ahead :)
 
I use a Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB as OS drive and a 3 TB Seagate ST3000DM001 with a Samsung 830 64 GB as SRT cache. I can generally recommend this setup. Intel SRT cannot use more than 64 GiB as cache and while you could put the cache on the same drive as the OS, I cannot recommend that. AFAIK the drive has to be unpartitioned for SRT, so if you ever break your cache you will need to shuffle the OS partition around to reactivate the cache.

I also have a large steam lib (although not THAT large, more like 230 games) and I do not play a lot of them simultaneously, so this setup makes sense.

Just as a sidenote: you could go with a single large SSD and only download the games you play currently and delete or move them to the HDD if you don't need them.

RAID0 makes no sense here, steam can use multiple drives for the library.
 
good find on that thread, kind of reassured me on what I was thinking of doing.

I think I might have a few smaller SSDs around actually. Kinda makes me want to upgrade so I can use one o those mini SSD cards that now get 1Gbps transfer speeds for the cache lol

wonder if anyone has attempted a cache drive with two blacks in raid 0 or if it is even possible lol (a quick search says yes)

yes I go for the wank factor as stated in that thread
 
No, RST is for devices attached to it as far as I am aware. If they are not detected in the RST console, no joy.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top