2 HDD RAID and a SSD for cache for a big Steam library?

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DavidVioMC

DavidVioMC

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Apr 25, 2016
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Before I start off, my knowledge about raids are very limited, I have a good understanding on how they work so if I say something that makes no sense or is impossible, please correct me.

So I have ThermalTake view 27 for my case and a full water loop and since there is no mountings for a roof radiator, I have a front mounted 360mm radiator. Which works fine but the bottom 120mm is only about an inch away from the hardrive cage which blocks almost all of the airflow to pass thru and I have a single 1TB 3.5" Toshiba HDD in there that I want to move and remove the cage to have better airflow. I also have a 120GB Kingston SSD for OS which is mounted behind motherboard which doesn't get in the way.

The case does have slots inside next to the motherboard for three 2.5 drives. So what I want to do is get rid of the 3.5 1TB drive and get either two 2.5 500GB HDD's or two 2.5 1TB HDD's and a 60GB/120GB SSD to use as cache for the two HDD's and mount all three inside so I can get rid of the hardrive cage. The reason why I want the two HDD's to run in a raid is because I have about 800GB worth of Steam library and external games such as standalone/Origin/UPlay ect. and I think they would load faster if I had them in raid rather that one 2.5 HDD and I think the SSD for cache can help them out.

I want to know if something like this would work and if not, how can I get it work, if theres better solutions, I'm opened to suggestions.
 
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T
Cache needs to read it first so it's slow until you play it again and it sounds like that's what you aren't doing. If you were playing the same 3 games then you wouldn't be posting this or else you would move those 3 games on your ssd. I assume you play a variety..

Say you play game A its slow then later you play again it's fast. Now you play game B thru H and go back to A, A is slow again

Good news is that your next cpu upgrade will have this solution with optane or storemi. Either way you could use a 500gb ssd. I bought another Samsung 960 500gb recently only 100$ you can buy other brands for less.

Not all games require ssd, some load fine on a hdd. Just move the big slower ones as needed, I do that all the time between a 240gb...
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geofelt

geofelt

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I think you will be disappointed.

Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most
desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates.
It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
In fact, if your block of data were to be spanned on two drives, random times would be greater.
There are some apps that will benefit. They are characterized by reading large files in a sequential overlapped manner.

Here is a older study using ssd devices in raid-0.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html
Spoiler... no benefit at all.

If you want drive performance, buy a large ssd.
 
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DavidVioMC

DavidVioMC

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Thanks for your input. Unfortunely 1TB SSD's are a bit out of my budget for this storage setup, my current game collection is just over 800GB and I want some head room for any updates or for any future games I may get. I'm sure having two SSD's, one for OS and one for games would be the best setup you can get, but it would be out of my budget and 2.5 HDD drives are pretty cheap now but for some reason I have this feeling that one 2.5 would be slower than 3.5, espically that 2.5 7200rpm are not very common. Would possibly 1TB 2.5 drive and 120GB or 256GB SSD for cache speed up the drive? I always see people using M.2 SSD's for HDD cache but I'm not sure if its due to M.2 being faster than SATA SSD's or just because M.2 is more compact than a SSD? Or is SATA SSD just not fast enough for HDD cache that would provide noticable difference?

 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Stay away from 2.5" HDD's. Generally 5400RPM, and obviously 'slower'.

"I always see people using M.2 SSD's for HDD cache but I'm not sure if its due to M.2 being faster than SATA SSD's or just because M.2 is more compact than a SSD? Or is SATA SSD just not fast enough for HDD cache that would provide noticable difference?"

You'd not see any difference with an m.2 as the cache vs a SATA III as the cache.
The problem is that the cache concept is not predictive. Go into a new level, and it is read at regular HDD speed.
Writes are also at regular HDD speed.

A small SSD as a cache for an HDD is not magic.
 
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t99

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Cache needs to read it first so it's slow until you play it again and it sounds like that's what you aren't doing. If you were playing the same 3 games then you wouldn't be posting this or else you would move those 3 games on your ssd. I assume you play a variety..

Say you play game A its slow then later you play again it's fast. Now you play game B thru H and go back to A, A is slow again

Good news is that your next cpu upgrade will have this solution with optane or storemi. Either way you could use a 500gb ssd. I bought another Samsung 960 500gb recently only 100$ you can buy other brands for less.

Not all games require ssd, some load fine on a hdd. Just move the big slower ones as needed, I do that all the time between a 240gb boot ssd 500gb ssd and 1tb hdd. If i want to suddenly play dues ex mkd i just move from 1tb to 500gb it takes like 2 minutes maybe, if that. Usually this is quick,the 50gv games take an extra minute or so. I personally don't switch games constantly, but I do it a nice bit
 
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