Big n Fast mechanical drive for games

WhiteHawk77 · 24 Oct 2020 at 03:24

Hey guys, looking for a 8TB mechanical drive that has a good speed for putting the majority of Steam games on, I have SSD’s for my favourite games but want a large drive for the rest of the library.

What’s a recommended drive for this?

Thanks.

Cyber-Mav · 24 Oct 2020 at 14:02

gonna be a 7200rpm one not the slower nas ones im guessing. get the cheapest that has fastest access times. used to be wd blacks but dunno now.

Phil2008 · 25 Oct 2020 at 03:48

I have the 4tb wd gold

EsaT · 25 Oct 2020 at 16:36

All HDDs are dog slow compared to SSDs.
Access/seek times are like thousand times longer.

Instead of wasting big TB price extras for hype you should go for normal affordable price and SSD caching.
While initial loads happen at speed of HDD, next load up of the game happens at speed of SSD.
And with playing of new maps more of the game'ss assets can be found from SSD cache speeding up subsequent load times, untill most of the games assets are loaded from SSD.
Continuing until SSD cache is full, at which point least/longest time ago used data is evicted from cache (and read from HDD next time) to make room new data in cache.

That would allow having big library of less often played games on cheap HDD space, but with game eventually loading at SSD speed when you play it.

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/did-some-benchmarking-of-an-ssd-caching-solution.2533859/

https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/
https://elitebytes.com/VeloSSD.aspx

Cyber-Mav · 25 Oct 2020 at 21:31

After watching youtube vids of game loading from ssd and hdd iv seen that not all games have massive loading difference. Kingdom come deliverance has huge speed advantage on ssd. So i got 500gb ssd for ganes that need the speed and rest if my stuff is on 1tb mechanical.