Best setup for gaming SSD or HDD or both?

katie279

katie279

katie279

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Hi all,

Just looking for a bit of advice - have a couple of gaming PCs and tend to download loads of steam games so they're ready to use when I want them. Especially girly games like the sims that have masses of addons or SkyRim VR which is enormous and complicated to set up with all its addons - so this eats disk space.

I've got a 1TB NVMe drive for OS, a 1TB SSD for games and a 1.5GB HDD also for games - and keep running out of space.

Am leaning towards just getting a huge 8TB drive and be done with it for good, but is there any major downsides to this? I get loading will be slower, but I guess I could choose the SSD for any games that really would demand it. I don't know but would a 8TB be significantly slower than a 2TB one for example?

Any thoughts welcome!
 
A larger capacity HDD (7200rpm ones) is usually faster or on par than a smaller capacity HDD. They are also more reliable (according to backblaze). The problems with a bigger HDD is they run slightly hotter and if they fail (usually within the first year), thats a lot of data lost or in your case a lot of data to be re-downloaded.
 
Hello,

Not a verified expert. I have some anecdotal experience. That's it.

I like your idea of of a monolithic 8TB drive. If you have the money, I'd go for an SSD like this: https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sams...FEUMp3c9QdRpE7vwBWleOtnPN1vvARfYaArA-EALw_wcB

It will be easy to manage - no need to defrag. There are faster drives. There are cheaper options too (HDD).

In answer to your question, some HDD would be slower then others. I don't believe there is a huge difference with basic consumer devices. It's more if the HDD is defragged, etc., regularly. The other side is the drive itself, speed of drives (RPM), cache size, seek times, read / write capacity (read /write heads, number of disk platters, etc.). Generally, enterprise drives are faster and more reliable. Speed on cheaper drives tend to tail off once the cache is maxed out. For Skyrim, the difference between HDD is going to far less then the difference between SSD vs HDD. Although HDD is still generally fine. It's just expectations.

As a side note, if you have not done it already, for best performance with a HDD, you may want to check the Windows OS power options e.g. prevent HDD from going to sleep.
 
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Syore said:
A larger capacity HDD (7200rpm ones) is usually faster or on par than a smaller capacity HDD. They are also more reliable (according to backblaze). The problems with a bigger HDD is they run slightly hotter and if they fail (usually within the first year), thats a lot of data lost or in your case a lot of data to be re-downloaded.
Click to expand...
There are no fast HDDs:
All HDDs are plain dog slow when we have SSDs as comparison. (except continuous writes in some QLC crap drives)
Hence there's zero sense for pay extras for any speed in HDDs.

Also big drives are now all Helium filled meaning lot lower drag resisting spinning and also allowing thinner lighter platters.
That makes them lot less power hungry at idle than small "air filled"/non-Helium.
And if one drive consumes 1x amount of power and other 2x, it should be pretty clear which runs hotter.



LeoK said:
I like your idea of of a monolithic 8TB drive. If you have the money, I'd go for an SSD like this: https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sams...FEUMp3c9QdRpE7vwBWleOtnPN1vvARfYaArA-EALw_wcB
Click to expand...
Not much sense to pay lot for SATA SSD for games.
DirectStorage won't support SATA and those games might drop to some old spinning rust era code path when installed on SATA SSD.
 
katie279 said:
Am leaning towards just getting a huge 8TB drive and be done with it for good, but is there any major downsides to this?
Click to expand...
For heavier and new games you want NVMe/PCIe drive.
DirectStorage won't support SATA and those games might drop to spinning rust era code path when installed on SATA drive.

Also for big library of older games played only occasionally, HDD with SSD caching would be cost effective.
It works really well for playing game for some time, before changing to different games.
While first time load happens at speed of HDD, successive loads get more and more of their data from cache and only new assets not loaded for previous maps etc need to be loaded from HDD.
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/did-some-benchmarking-of-an-ssd-caching-solution.2533859/
 
katie279 said:
Am leaning towards just getting a huge 8TB drive and be done with it for good, but is there any major downsides to this?
Click to expand...
It will be noticeably slower to run games from HDD. I don't recommend running games from HDD unless you have no choice.
Also, having HDD of any kind adds noise an vibration. And slows down boot time by needing to spin them up first.
Can't wait to get rid of mine.

But as a cold storage for archived copies of game, it could work. External HDD would be perfect.
Is there an even easier way to backup and restore my Steam Library?

The other method for backing up and restoring is quick and dirty. Find the subfolder where your Steam stores game files. By default, it should be "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\.” You should see a list of game files here, copy the entire folder and paste it onto your storage device.

To restore, delete any preexisting installs and copy the folder back to its original location. Select “Install” from the game’s library entry, and Steam will discover all local files, download updates, and restore them. This takes less time than the first method—you just have to be sure you have enough space to move files around.
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https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-backup/

8TB+ drives are hitting 200MB/s easily. So it would take 3 minutes to copy a 18GB game to NVME, a minute to reindex, couple minutes to update...
 
:eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:

Wooah, I love you guys! You're all awesome, really useful information - ok so I think my plan is to get a PCIe adapter with as many NVMe slits as poss and then I can load it up with drives. Think I've seen ones with four slots, so that should cover me and future proof a bit!

Shout if I'm being stupid/dim!!!
 
katie279 said:
:eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:

Wooah, I love you guys! You're all awesome, really useful information - ok so I think my plan is to get a PCIe adapter with as many NVMe slits as poss and then I can load it up with drives. Think I've seen ones with four slots, so that should cover me and future proof a bit!

Shout if I'm being stupid/dim!!!
Click to expand...

**Caveat** There are people on here who know a lot more then me. My layman's concern is you could end-up sharing PCI-E lanes between M2 drives and other devices. https://pcguide101.com/motherboard/how-many-pcie-lanes-does-m-2-slot-use/

I'd think it's ok but I will let an expert confirm if there is a real world risk / if I am wrong
 
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katie279 said:
:eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:

Wooah, I love you guys! You're all awesome, really useful information - ok so I think my plan is to get a PCIe adapter with as many NVMe slits as poss and then I can load it up with drives. Think I've seen ones with four slots, so that should cover me and future proof a bit!

Shout if I'm being stupid/dim!!!
Click to expand...

@katie279
Your PCI-E slot needs to support bifurcation to do this, if it is a 16x slot that means a 4x4x4x4 configuration which is configured in the BIOS. IF you are still with the same board from the other day then you won't be able to do this right now. You can put a single SLOT adapter in the 4x PCI-E SLOT you have on the board but that I believe is limited to PCI-E 2.0 speeds so won't take full advantage of the faster NVMe drives on the market.

My advice would be to stick with what you have at the moment in SSD terms, and get the larger 3.5" hard drive and swap out games when needed, if you might be playing them more than once in a day/week/month (whatever you deem as regularly), you can pick up 8-10TB for not a lot. When you finally change systems to one with more PCI-E lanes, and m.2 SLOTS then you might find that m.2 drives are also much cheaper.
 
Presuming your on AMD platform. I've just started using AMD's StoreMI, I'm actually very impressed with it.

I'm caching a HDD, and in CrystalDiskMark I'm getting near to my NVMe speed on the read requests.

In your situation I would buy a HDD of appropriate size, then choose say a 500GB NVMe drive to cache the most frequent read requests.
 
katie279 said:
Oh ok, so I have an AB350 as motherboard in this PC and have slapped in a single PCIe adapter with NVMe drive in this already.

Are we saying I wouldn't be able to use one of the four way adapters on this?
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The royal we? :D
I am saying you can't as no bifurcation on the board, and you can't address single M.2 drives on a 4-way adapter without it, unless it has an on-board RAID controller or similar and they are £££'s
 
Heheh, more like the Borg 'we' that is the collective intelligence of overclockers forums!

Ah ok, darn it - I've fitted a single drive and adapter so I've now got one using the motherboard slot and one using the pcie adapter, so think that might be my cap on this PC then.... Grrrrrr I can see a new motherboard being attractive in a year or two....
 
katie279 said:
Heheh, more like the Borg 'we' that is the collective intelligence of overclockers forums!
Click to expand...

Does the collective 'dumbness' get taken away from the intelligence, if so the collective maybe less clever than you think. :cry:

katie279 said:
Ah ok, darn it - I've fitted a single drive and adapter so I've now got one using the motherboard slot and one using the pcie adapter, so think that might be my cap on this PC then.... Grrrrrr I can see a new motherboard being attractive in a year or two....
Click to expand...

Yes, that would be your limit I'm afraid, those are the limitations of the older/cheaper boards when people were asking what was the point in M.2 slots, and that it was pointless, oh those days... AM5 is out back end of this year, so you could avoid getting that CPU upgrade you were talking about and just wait for that. :)
 
The DirectStorage mention is on point but it's worth noting that DS isn't something that will become mainstream for a number of years yet. As of right now no new games for PC have a roadmap to make use of DS and your existing library will likely remain legacy storage anyway. In fact I think only Witcher 3 is set to get a next gen update that makes use of it but that's it so far..

For ref I bought an 8TB Samsung 870 SSD, it's SATA and gets over 500MB/s read and write so something like that you could use as a game storage drive. The only thing is the 75GB odd cache which when full up during a very large transfer workload, will mean the write speed slows down from 500+ to around 100MB/s - Though in a game download scenario that won't be an issue as STEAM etc download in chunks and then decrypt etc.

The MTBF/TBW before failure of a modern SSD is so long that you would need to be constantly writing to it for several years before reaching close to its failure point, and even then that's without having any Overprovison space enabled. factoring that in, the longevity and performance would be even longer.

It's an option worth considering. Not exactly cheap of course but nice way to get SSD speed storage and means you're totally spinning disk-free.
 
katie279 said:
I've got a 1TB NVMe drive for OS, a 1TB SSD for games and a 1.5GB HDD also for games - and keep running out of space.
Click to expand...

Please tell me you've not got just the OS on the NVME drive? As that's an extreme waste for 1TB of capacity. Windows would barely used 1/8th of that capacity.

Stick any big / frequently used games also on the NVME drive and enjoy the faster loading times.

If you wanted the NVME drive solely used for OS, then i'd suggest buying a significantly smaller capacity drive and use the 1TB drive for games.
 
Errrrr....nervous shuffling....... Yes I have.... :confused::confused:

Actually had a 500gb one before, but found it was starting to get near limit with general bloat that builds up and caching (eg Photoshop, Cinema etc etc). So effectively use as OS and temp memory disk.

Am I a dimwit?

PS thanks to the advice above, I've now got a second 1 TB NVMe drive for games...! Thing is it gets eaten so quickly - eg just installing Skyrim VR with the Ultimate VR modlist (800+ mods) - boosh! 250gb gone!
 
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