So my 1TB Caviar Blue is at 100GBs and I think it’s time to add more storage. Not really sure what to go with, the only thing that comes to mind is another 1TB Blue? What concerns me more though, is the general process and what people usually do. I simply install my new drive, initialize drive and that’s it? If I’m using it for gaming, i’d have to install a new instance of Steam and whatnot and use it on that drive? Or should I start up a RAID 0 array with both of my Blue drives working together?
Well, I don’t have a budget really. I saw the Blue VNAND WD Blue SSD on sale. $120 CDN is really nice for 1TB of SSD storage. But I just don’t know if I necessarily need it now. I think another 1TB Blue will be good enough. I tend to overthink things plus i’m paranoid. I think of the long term reliability. Maybe the SSD would be a good option? I don’t know. Maybe moving Witcher 3 to an SSD might help the split-second stutter when running in fucking Novigrad every 2 seconds… Apparently that was a Nvidia GPU problem. I never found a fix, pfft.
But yeah, adding an SSD? I don’t know. I was thinking of finally adding more SSD storage when I upgrade my CPU and motherboard 2 years down the line. It’s just a few of these new games I have installed that have been a problem. They’re simply massive. I have Call of Smores: Modern Campire taking up 175 fucking GBs. And other games. Down to 100 GBs on the Blue and I really don’t wanna install anything more. Oh, and I remember some of the things I know about RAID so it just came to mind. Doesn’t RAID 0 make the redundancy act as if 2 drives are basically acting as 1?
RAID 0 spreads data evenly over the drives. The idea is that since one half of the data is on one drive and one half on the other you can theoretically double throughput. But if even one drive fails, everything is lost. Which is why I questioned its usability in an age where nvme drives with their gb/s+ transfer speeds are overkill for most people.
I don’t think SSD’s in 2019 are more or less reliable than HDD’s. Both can fail. Not sure if you should worry about losing hundreds of gigabytes of game asset data when one does, unless your internet connection is bad/capped.
You plug it in, you format it, if you wish you chop it on multiple partitions, if not - one partition the entire drive and that’s it.
No need to do anything more.
If you want this to be your main gaming drive just install Steam on it.
If not - do whatever you want.
Adding new drive does not at any way help or hinder the existing drives and vice versa…
Steam can easily store games on multiple drives, it’s what I do.
If you add a library folder like @Zibob said you can choose which drive a game is installed on when you first download it. You can also move them from drive to drive later if desired. Don’t need to do anything fancy, just format the disk as normal for your OS and tell Steam to add a library folder to it.
I keep my non-hard drive intensive games or games I’m not currently playing on my 2 TB hard drive. Games that have a lot of loading screens, games I am currently playing, or games that otherwise work better with faster loading times stay on the SSD.
You don’t even need to change it completely. You can have multiple library folders on multiple drives. I just have a Steam Drive (2TB spinning rust) where steam itself is on my C: and all the games are on the separate Steam Drive.
Makes it easy when reinstalling OSs or hardware. Just install Steam as normal, plug in the Steam Drive and tell Steam that is where the games are and it will add them all to the library and carry on.
Because BRAND NAME… For years people have been kissing Samsung’s butcheaks. Same as ASUS and Corsair and Nvidia… And here we are. Same performance - higher price because brand…
My point was the new Galaxy 2,0 allows you to have only this client and connects you to Steam and the rest without needing to have Steam client or Uplay or what not installed.
I’m not saying they are bad. They are just overpriced. I mean seriously, I can gen 1TB NVMe drive from other brands for the price of Samsung SATA drives. The samsung drives are perfectly fine, but come on…
WD Blue SSDs are perfectly fine. With Samsung you’re really paying for the name more than anything at this point. I doubt anybody would notice a difference between the 860 EVO and the WD Blue in use.
Its all about your situation. A cheap nas may be in order if your on windows. Death wish raid is ok if you fine losing all your data with a failure of any drive.
Still even cheap nas’s fail with power supplies etc outside of drives failing.
If your a pirate or a gamer. Its usually fine you can download everything again in time from torrents and steam or GOG etc. Mostly you just need to keep a small amount of personal files backed up in a few places. File a USB stick, online data service and your machine or nas.
But yeah I might just go for the 1TB WD Blue SSD.
