Is the futureproof gaming solution a four drive system?

[nomdeplume]

OS - Fastest NVMe

Gaming:
xxTB HDD for everything that can run on it in current OS build without texture issues or .............................................................loading.
SATA SSD for games that exhibit better lows and general behaviors on it as opposed to NVMe.
NVMe for unoptimized, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA hyphey games you own that are just there to fill the need and those that actually utilize it to create fuller immersion and reaction times. Build/patch specific qualification.


Believe I see a reassertion of this (relatively) old question becoming more prominent for enthusiast gaming. With RAM and system balance being primary. At this point firmware access to firmware unlocked or physically present capabilities being secondary or tertiary. For my own purposes the reality on modern hardware has been unexpected per game age and system stress a game produces.

Momentum of lowest common denominator business practices aside, chasing where the % that fully unlocks enjoyment exists is leading me to question where everyone else on this increasingly aging body of membership site is at? By all means the under-30's shoved into lurking will have their response defended.

 

[blinnbanir]

I have 30TB and cannot install all the Games I own. It is all relative.

 

[Onasi]

There is no such thing as a “futureproof solution” for anything in PC building. Everyone has different needs in terms of capacity and speed. Not everyone plays dozens of games simultaneously or needs their entire library downloaded somewhere. Personally, I would never put an HDD into my personal daily ever again, no reason to. We have no way to know what the future will look like, of course, but as it stands today there is little point for any regular “gamer” to go for anything but a solitary 1/2/4TB (depending on the needs) NVMe drive for all their needs. Obviously, if the usage isn’t only gaming and mass storage is required the situation changes, but that’s a different kettle of fish entirely and I would advocate having a NAS or a dedicated file server for auch cases rather than sticking HDDs into your case anyway, but that’s a personal POV.

 

[nomdeplume]

There is no such thing as a “futureproof solution” for anything in PC building.

1080ti and likely X3D aside.

All I know is HDD are far from being pastured or becoming legacy devices in SATA III form. If anything NAND is going to undergo vast shifts rendering the current form unrecognizable. Just as umpteen USB revisions have amidst attempts to be the IP owning entity that wins out.

 

[bonehead123]

There is no such thing as a “futureproof solution” for anything in PC building.

^^THIS^^

So true, unless you consider the "future" as next week/month/year....otherwise the term "future-proofing" as related to pc's is just a fools errand and should be banished from the world's languages, cause it will relentlessly run you & your bank account into the depths of hades, then laugh at you while you burn to dust

For me & my situation, I have 36TB of storage amongst the internal m.2's, and internal and external 2.5" sata drives, with ZERO spinning rust to be found anywhere

My company of course has mega-PB's in NAS's, Raid arrays (spinners) & cloud storage, but that's on their dime, not mine...

 

[AVATARAT]

OS - Fastest NVMe

Gaming:
xxTB HDD for everything that can run on it in current OS build without texture issues or .............................................................loading.
SATA SSD for games that exhibit better lows and general behaviors on it as opposed to NVMe.
NVMe for unoptimized, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA hyphey games you own that are just there to fill the need and those that actually utilize it to create fuller immersion and reaction times. Build/patch specific qualification.


Believe I see a reassertion of this (relatively) old question becoming more prominent for enthusiast gaming. With RAM and system balance being primary. At this point firmware access to firmware unlocked or physically present capabilities being secondary or tertiary. For my own purposes the reality on modern hardware has been unexpected per game age and system stress a game produces.

Momentum of lowest common denominator business practices aside, chasing where the % that fully unlocks enjoyment exists is leading me to question where everyone else on this increasingly aging body of membership site is at? By all means the under-30's shoved into lurking will have their response defended.

Both are on HDD, but 64GB DDR5 + PrimoCache fixes the load time, yes it need to be loaded once.

 

[Visible Noise]

Both are on HDD, but 64GB DDR5 + PrimoCache fixes the load time, yes it need to be loaded once.

Everyone that wants high performance storage should be using Primocache.

I can’t believe that the idea of RAM caching seems to have been forgotten about. PCTools included it in tne 80’s.

 

[Vayra86]

Very simple in my world.

OS: SSD - preferably something in m2 slot, since its a drive you won't remove any time soon.
Games: SSD - whatever it is. Sata or on board.
The rest: SSD - can be QLC.

Speeds and performance and all that? For any normal / general usage and gaming, its completely irrelevant. I just want a drive that doesn't die fast so QLC needs to be very cheap and reserved only for mass storage.

This is the current status; numerous games installed

C: Lexar NM790
D: Crucial BX100
E: Samsung 850 EVO
F: Samsung 980

 

[blinnbanir]

Very simple in my world.

OS: SSD - preferably something in m2 slot, since its a drive you won't remove any time soon.
Games: SSD - whatever it is. Sata or on board.
The rest: SSD - can be QLC.

Speeds and performance and all that? For any normal / general usage and gaming, its completely irrelevant. I just want a drive that doesn't die fast so QLC needs to be very cheap and reserved only for mass storage.

This is the current status; numerous games installed

View attachment 392337
C: Lexar NM790
D: Crucial BX100
E: Samsung 850 EVO
F: Samsung 980

LM790 is not cheap.

 

[Easy Rhino]

Momentum of lowest common denominator business practices aside, chasing where the % that fully unlocks enjoyment exists is leading me to question where everyone else on this increasingly aging body of membership site is at? By all means the under-30's shoved into lurking will have their response defended.

Stop trying to min/max every aspect of your life.

 

[evernessince]

I'd say if you don't have enough to buy all SSDs, Primo Cache + HDDs + a cache SSD is a pretty good middle ground.

 

[Ruru]

120GB drive for OS and 2x240GB + 480GB + 2x1TB for games. I should get moar game storage though.

 

[Vayra86]

LM790 is not cheap.

Price per gb was among the lowest for drives in this segment. Its one of the most cost effective, quality drives to get atm.

 

[blinnbanir]

Price per gb was among the lowest for drives in this segment. Its one of the most cost effective, quality drives to get atm.

They also go on sale every once in a while. They had the 1 TB for $99 Canadian at the PC store yesterday.

 

[Macro Device]

And here I am, vibing out with whatever SSDs I have on hand. Types don't really matter.

Sure, if you have unlimited money and an endless itch for perfection, you might go ahead and invest into a shitload of speed demon SSDs for all occasions but first, it's still gonna be expensive, and second, it's not gonna help you as much as you'd expect. AAA games of latest years don't deserve such a treatment. Competitive games are still heavily bottlenecked by your CPU.

Just get the highest volume drive with good reliability track you can afford. If overly concerned, buy two thereof.

There's so many ways we can optimize our PC experience. Overspending and overthinking on SSDs for a gaming system isn't one of them.

 

[Sithaer]

I still use a 4 TB HDD in my PC but its only used for hoarding old stuff from my previous systems/drives and movies/series since I don't use any streaming service for such.

Other than that I only have my fastest 256 GB NVMe OS drive and 2x1 TB whatever else SSD as my game drives.
Tbh I only keep a few games installed that I play often enough and the rest I download whenever I feel like playing them. 'Luckily my inet connection is fast enough that I can DL a bigger AAA game like DOOM Eternal in 30 mins or so..'

 

[blinnbanir]

And here I am, vibing out with whatever SSDs I have on hand. Types don't really matter.

Sure, if you have unlimited money and endless itch for perfection, you might go ahead and invest into a shitload of speed demon SSDs for all occasions but first, it's still gonna be expensive, and second, it's not gonna help you as much as you'd expect. AAA games of latest years don't deserve such a treatment. Competitive games are still heavily bottlenecked by your CPU.

Just get a highest volume drive with good reliability track you can afford. If overly concerned, buy two thereof.

There's so many ways we can optimize our PC experience. Overspending and overthinking on SSDs for a gaming system isn't one of them.

It has been so long. Remember those OCZ drives? Since we went digital in Games on PC I no longer needed bookcases to store my library. The Explosion of AM4 is part of it for me. There have always been budget solutions with compelling performance. As my Game library has grown so have my Storage needs. I never fill a drive and with NAND my principle is 70% full max. It is also cool testing all of the tech. With the new Game platforms some innovations come as well. Epic loves 9000 CPUs and fast NAND. When you are downloading a Game there is something called Epic Web helper that you can see in task manager.

 

[Macro Device]

Remember those OCZ drives?

When they were a thing I was an unemployed underage university student with almost zero cash to my name. I barely made it to have a PC on a Pentium G620 + HD 5770 with some el cheapo second hand HDD as the only drive doing odd jobs.

 

[nomdeplume]

120GB drive for OS and 2x240GB + 480GB + 2x1TB for games. I should get moar game storage though.

Seem to remember you got a small devoted drive for music recently. Is there a choice being made to pursue [150% size] individual drives for each purpose?

This is actually on topic. Adjustments to bring about the best in something used numerous hours a day. Without neurosis or tunnel vision limiting awareness. Sheer amount of hardware you trade among friends is enough to make one wonder to what purpose something like a 24TB HDD or 12TB SSD would find. Find it hard to believe one could digest that much liquor and play among that many builds without refinements taking place. Without finding a few places a little better outcome is a lot more enjoyable.

Edit: Futureproof takes on a different and highly intended meaning when actually considering legacy hardware. As opposed to the mini-corporate staging grounds of disposable NAS drives.

 

[Ruru]

Seem to remember you got a small devoted drive for music recently. Is there a choice being made to pursue [150% size] individual drives for each purpose?

This is actually on topic. Adjustments to bring about the best in something used numerous hours a day. Without neurosis or tunnel vision limiting awareness. Sheer amount of hardware you trade among friends is enough to make one wonder to what purpose something like a 24TB HDD or 12TB SSD would find. Find it hard to believe one could digest that much liquor and play among that many builds without refinements taking place. Without finding a few places a little better outcome is a lot more enjoyable.

Edit: Futureproof takes on a different and highly intended meaning when actually considering legacy hardware. As opposed to the mini-corporate staging grounds of disposable NAS drives.

That recent 500GB USB3 HDD is actually for music backups, I still hold them mainly at my warehouse HDD (2TB USB3 HDD).

 

[Konomi]

I'd say that speed is fairly redundant for games at this current time, rather the priority should be on drive capacity. Sure, you may get a slight load time improvement going from a gen 3 NVMe SSD to a gen 4 (or 5), but nothing too dramatic. As long as you can comfortably store the games you intend to play (and have headroom for updates), you'll be fine.

 

[silentbogo]

Reasonably, I'd keep ~500G on SSD for games, which in today's terms is 3-4 AAA titles Having more than a dozen games installed is usually a sign that you need an intervention
Personally I have downsized to a single 2TB NVMe SSD. I keep my personal stuff on small NAS, and I kinda grew over the debacle of "owning vs streaming" for my multimedia. I do still have a few TBs of my favorite movies (which fit on a 256GB flash drive) and a couple dozen movies and TV shows on BluRay, but I forgot the last time I touched either one. I do not store anything of that sorts on my PC, except for my dusty music library. On my PC a single 2TB NVMe SSD gets the job done for everything. Maybe I'll add another 2TB in the future, but I'm totally fine as is.

Another thing that bothers me in OPs post is having "future-proofing" and "HDDs" mentioned in the same post. I think you are overthinking - just get a mediocre NVMe SSD of decent size(the bigger - the better), and call it a day. Even PCIe 3.0 x4 will get the job done, including fast OS load times, minimal texture streaming issues in UE5(you can't avoid those regardless of what storage you have), and decent price comparing to latest and greatest. Those HDDs will be better off storing your critical/personal stuff and backups. SATA and NVMe price difference nowadays is negligible(at least in a budget-minded segment), and HDDs become more expensive and less reliable year after year. Unless you already have them, or you re-a-a-a-a-ally need high-capacity drive, there is no reason to waste money on it. Funy thing: just noticed that in my area a shitty 1TB HDD costs more than 1TB NVMe SSD... Price/gb only starts to make sense 4TB upward, which in turn brings up the issue of SMR vs CMR, longevity and reliability, etc...

 

[AVATARAT]

I'd say if you don't have enough to buy all SSDs, Primo Cache + HDDs + a cache SSD is a pretty good middle ground.

You are wrong, all NVMEs are slower than Primo Cache.

Because the RAMDrive it creates/uses has lower latency and faster read, write and copy than any storage.

 

[evernessince]

You are wrong, all NVMEs are slower than Primo Cache.

Because the RAMDrive it creates/uses has lower latency and faster read, write and copy than any storage.

You can always tell someone has a balanced and thought out take when their comment begins with what is essentially "you are wrong and I am right and there is no nuance or anything that I'm leaving out". (FYI obvious sarcasm).

Most people don't use RAM as their game cache and for very good reasons:

1) It's infeasible for anyone with large game libraries. It requires a shed load of expensive memory when you are talking about caching 8TB+ of games. People report 3-10% of a game's total size is cached. That's 400 GB of RAM at a conservative 5% per game. That is beyond the max RAM capacity of most consumer systems, let alone the abysmal timings and latency that would have. Heck even if it was possible you'd be dropping a cool 1.3K on that much memory, which defeats the purpose for the OP in the first place. If OP has that kind of money they could simply buy an 800GB optane which is actually a cache drive with 5x the sequential speeds and gets pretty darn close latency wise that isn't volitile and doesn't come with the drawbacks of a RAM Cache. Better yet, just get regular SSDs. The benefit of Optane is very minmal for games (I would know, I've compared my 800GB P5800X to my PCIe 5.0 T700 4TB).

2) Power loss or crashes result in data loss as the RAM Cache is volatile and only saved at certain times. Any memory errors will also cause corruption.

3) A RAM cache competes for memory bandwidth. Any performance demonstrated in benchmarks will be lower in gaming scenarios, as your RAM cache now has to compete with the game for bandwidth.

4) There is no practical benefit. People are not going to notice the difference between a game on RAM cache and a game on a decent SSD. Heck, there's hardly any benefit to anything faster than PCIe 3.0 in general.

In addition to the above, a RAM cache has great latency figures but poor sequential figures:

In fact that sequential performance is piss poor and that will impact gaming performance. People who have tested a RAM Cache on a game reported no benefit so perhaps the two balance each other out.

The performance characteristics make sense though, DDR is optimized for random performance and latency. It's GDDR that's optimized for throughput.

RAM Caches aren't really suited nor beneficial to games in the vast majority of cases as the points above clearly illustrate. What works for you doesn't immediately work for others.

Everyone that wants high performance storage should be using Primocache.

I can’t believe that the idea of RAM caching seems to have been forgotten about. PCTools included it in tne 80’s.

PrimoCache isn't primarily about RAM caching. That's certainly something you can do but not what most people use it for. The reason you don't see people with RAM Caches is because:

1) There is little to no benefit over SSDs.
2) RAM is expensive and it may not even be feasible depending on the size of your game library.
3) Larger amounts of RAM trade-off frequency and latency. Getting a hard to quantify benefit for very real disadvantage is not very appealing.
4) RAM Cache competes for memory bandwidth.

PrimoCache is far more commonly used to create an SSD cache for hard drives because that benefit is noticeable, easy to setup, and cheap. A 1TB SSD can be had for $70 - $80 and with that capacity you can cache a massive amount of data.

 

[AVATARAT]

You can always tell someone has a balanced and thought out take when their comment begins with what is essentially "you are wrong and I am right and there is no nuance or anything that I'm leaving out". (FYI obvious sarcasm).

Most people don't use RAM as their game cache and for very good reasons:

1) It's infeasible for anyone with large game libraries. It requires a shed load of expensive memory when you are talking about caching 8TB+ of games. People report 3-10% of a game's total size is cached. That's 400 GB of RAM at a conservative 5% per game. That is beyond the max RAM capacity of most consumer systems, let alone the abysmal timings and latency that would have. Heck even if it was possible you'd be dropping a cool 1.3K on that much memory, which defeats the purpose for the OP in the first place. If OP has that kind of money they could simply buy an 800GB optane which is actually a cache drive with 5x the sequential speeds and gets pretty darn close latency wise that isn't volitile and doesn't come with the drawbacks of a RAM Cache. Better yet, just get regular SSDs. The benefit of Optane is very minmal for games (I would know, I've compared my 800GB P5800X to my PCIe 5.0 T700 4TB).

2) Power loss or crashes result in data loss as the RAM Cache is volatile and only saved at certain times. Any memory errors will also cause corruption.

3) A RAM cache competes for memory bandwidth. Any performance demonstrated in benchmarks will be lower in gaming scenarios, as your RAM cache now has to compete with the game for bandwidth.

4) There is no practical benefit. People are not going to notice the difference between a game on RAM cache and a game on a decent SSD. Heck, there's hardly any benefit to anything faster than PCIe 3.0 in general.

In addition to the above, a RAM cache has great latency figures but poor sequential figures:

View attachment 392490

In fact that sequential performance is piss poor and that will impact gaming performance. People who have tested a RAM Cache on a game reported no benefit so perhaps the two balance each other out.

The performance characteristics make sense though, DDR is optimized for random performance and latency. It's GDDR that's optimized for throughput.

RAM Caches aren't really suited nor beneficial to games in the vast majority of cases as the points above clearly illustrate. What works for you doesn't immediately work for others.



PrimoCache isn't primarily about RAM caching. That's certainly something you can do but not what most people use it for. The reason you don't see people with RAM Caches is because:

1) There is little to no benefit over SSDs.
2) RAM is expensive and it may not even be feasible depending on the size of your game library.
3) Larger amounts of RAM trade-off frequency and latency. Getting a hard to quantify benefit for very real disadvantage is not very appealing.
4) RAM Cache competes for memory bandwidth.

PrimoCache is far more commonly used to create an SSD cache for hard drives because that benefit is noticeable, easy to setup, and cheap. A 1TB SSD can be had for $70 - $80 and with that capacity you can cache a massive amount of data.

It all depends on the point of view.

If the user is not interested in a few seconds more loading - yes, the benefit is small.
When I'm playing, I want the game I'm playing to load faster, and when I'm loading saves several times for death, I'd rather not wait 3-4 seconds for loading, but 1-2 seconds.

Some of the things you said are true, I agree it's not for everyone but for those looking for speed.
Yes, this way has disadvantages, but if you are afraid of bears, just don't go into the forest.

On the other side, Radeon cards can use RAM cache, and I can tell you that the new Radeon 9070 XTs benefit more from RAM cache than the old Radeon cards

But I couldn't get RAM Cache to work with my previous RTX 4080 Super, I think Nvidia just doesn't take advantage of RAM Cache because it uses its own cache in C: drive by default. If you stop it in the driver, it doesn't take the benefit again, so I think you can't test it yourself (4090 in your specs). This is one of the reasons I sold my 4080, it just loads games/saves slower than Radeon