Caching and gaming

KrombopulosAndy · 8 Apr 2020 at 11:48

So I'm looking at upgrading my storage capacity for my steam library to about 8TB's. I'm wondering what the opinion is around here on setting up a 32GB Optane cache or a larger NVME SSD cache for a hard drive to improve game load speed and reduce hangups when assets are actively loaded from disk?

It looks like I could get a 250GB NVME SSD for the same price as a 32GB Optane cache but the write resilience and IOPS could swing it.

EsaT · 8 Apr 2020 at 21:17

Forget paying Intel prices and get some good normal drive and PrimoCache.
It works by using partition on any SSD as as cache for drives based on drive letters in Windows.
It also doesn't case any extra "fragility"/extra failure chances when operating in read caching mode.
https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/overview.html
https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/instructions-manage-l2storage.html

After game assets get cached next load is as fast as from SSD:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/did-some-benchmarking-of-an-ssd-caching-solution.2533859/

Though you would want modern heavier games to be directly on SSD at least if you pla ythem frequently.
Which you can actually do in Steam:
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/move-steam-games-another-drive-folder

KrombopulosAndy · 8 Apr 2020 at 22:08

Thanks for the suggestion, prima cache looks very good even compared to optane. Looking at what's available to me right now I think it makes a ton more sense to go for it as I can't even source a 32GB Optane module at the moment. Not being locked in to Intel is also nice.

I'll probably end up going for a WD Blue 6TB (PMR version) with the 250GB Samsung 970 NVME SSD. I believe that should give me a pretty good balance of performance, capacity and price.

EsaT · 9 Apr 2020 at 09:36

KrombopulosAndy said:
I'll probably end up going for a WD Blue 6TB (PMR version) with the 250GB Samsung 970 NVME SSD. I believe that should give me a pretty good balance of performance, capacity and price.

Samsung is master of overpricing.
You can basically get about twice the capacity for same price from other makers giving space for more uses.
(you can use part of SSD normally and only part of it for caching)

Bigger drive also increases write endurance.
And Phison E12 based drives simply curb stomp Samsung in TBW rating.

If using large cache size and having 16GB of memory it would be good to increase cache block size to lower memory need for cache's "bookkeeping/indexing".
https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/instructions-create-cache.html
Windows itself does drive caching with free memory, so best to do only "Level-2" caching (SSD cache) in PrimoCache.

KrombopulosAndy · 9 Apr 2020 at 10:34

Good shout, do you have any suggestions on E12 drives? So far I've found the Seagate Firecuda and Corsair MP510. These claim lesser, but still great performance compared to the Samsung 970 and over double the TBW. These defeinitely sound like a better choice for a caching drive.

chroniclard · 9 Apr 2020 at 11:09

Do you need to keep 8TB of games? Given BB speed these days most games can be downloaded quite quickly. Just get a decent sized SSD for games you are playing.

KrombopulosAndy · 9 Apr 2020 at 11:39

Unfortunately I don't live in an area with great internet and modern games are often well over 100GBs now. The max speed I can get is 30Mbps which means an 8+ hour download time for a lot of modern games. This is made worse by me constantly switching between games depending on mood/friends/if my internet is even working right now. It's getting quite frusting repeatedly deleting/downloading games and having to switch them between my 2x1TB HDDs and my SSD to get decent performance. I also have a bunch of other random data on there that takes up even more space. In short I would like > 4TB of data storage that has better performance than just an HDD on it's own and I don't have £400+ to drop on 2 2TB SSDs

JasonM · 10 Apr 2020 at 00:51

EsaT said:
It also doesn't case any extra "fragility"/extra failure chances when operating in read caching mode.

If in read mode only, is integrity of HDD data maintained even if the SSD fails?

The reason I never liked Optane was if the Optane drive failed (or Optain drive removed) data integrity on the HDD was lost also.

EsaT · 10 Apr 2020 at 10:33

JasonM said:
If in read mode only, is integrity of HDD data maintained even if the SSD fails?

The reason I never liked Optane was if the Optane drive failed (or Optain drive removed) data integrity on the HDD was lost also.

PrimoCache isn't any RAIDS 0's weaknesses (single drive failing kills all data) inheriting tiered storage splitting and moving blocks of data between drives.
https://storageswiss.com/2014/01/15/whats-the-difference-between-tiering-and-caching/
That lot increased vulnerability and very bad recoverability is exactly what I consider as bad for home users in AMD's StoreMi.
Hopefully AMD is going to replace it by PrimoCache/similar now that they announced discontinuing StoreMi.
https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/storemi-product-change-advisory.pdf

Without using also write caching PrimoCache doesn't mess in any way with how Windows stores data on cached volumes.
Unless HW or Windows throws fit cache drive's failure shouldn't cause any more than maybe some notification and slowing down to uncached speed.
And certainly caching SSD could be removed completely and in case of Windows being on cached HDD it and everything else would boot normally.
Except at HDD's speed...

EsaT · 10 Apr 2020 at 10:45

KrombopulosAndy said:
Good shout, do you have any suggestions on E12 drives? So far I've found the Seagate Firecuda and Corsair MP510. These claim lesser, but still great performance compared to the Samsung 970 and over double the TBW. These defeinitely sound like a better choice for a caching drive.

PNY CS3030 and TeamGroup MP34 are others with five year warranty.
Some others like Patriot (VPN100) give only three year warranty.
Sabrent Rocket (avoid QLC based Q) is also Phison E12 based.

TBW is actually other alternative limit for when warranty ends besides time.
They just put that warranty clause into that "small print" in hard to find place.
Makes Samsung's warranty suddenly look lot worser for the luxury prices...

And in home use those IOPS numbers don't mean anything.
This is more home use like benchmarking scenario:
https://youtu.be/GlGjd1GZWdo?t=16m45s
In home use there's mostly only one or few threads accessing drive and also queue depth would be rather low.

JasonM · 10 Apr 2020 at 13:48

Est, thanks for clarification just looked at PrimoCache.

I've mentioned before, I'm a software dev and I use Western Digital enterprise drives (Gold or Ultrastars) in my worksation(s), main reason is high IO disk activity from SQL server, plus WD enterprise drives are 10x more reliable then most consumer drives.

I'll be trying PrimoCache to SSD cache those drives in read mode.