Caching and gaming

[KrombopulosAndy]

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.

 

[KrombopulosAndy]

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.

 

[KrombopulosAndy]

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.

 

[KrombopulosAndy]

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