I’ve recently come back to PC gaming after years on PS4 (I eventually got fed up with terrible load times and 30fps). I’ve refreshed the hardware in my old Windows machine (from an old i5 + GTX 660 to Ryzen 1700 + RX580) and installed Solus (which I use for work and have on my personal laptop)… BUT my old 500GB HDD is failing and the cheap, 2nd hand, 500GB SSD boot drive I picked up is now full (mostly: Movies + Games)
It’s just after Christmas so I’m very budget conscious … I’m after 1+ TB of space but am also wary of poor load times on my games (one reason my PS4 is now gathering dust). I was looking at potentially a 240gb M.2 as cache for a 2TB HDD but I’ve no idea if that’s going to give the performance I want (faster game load times) nor how to set it up under linux? Or if it’s even a good idea and I should just get a 2TB HDD or cheap 1 TB SSD. Help or advice on the matter would be appreciated.
My current specs are:
Ryzen 1700 @ 3.8Ghz,
16gb of 3200Mhz RAM,
Samsung EVO 500GB SSD,
Radeon RX 580 8GB.
MSI B450M Mortar,
OS: Solus Linux.
Crucial MX500 1TB is very reasonably priced most of the time and sometimes a straight up steal. Look for those. Spinning rust is dead. (At least in desktop machines.)
TBH m.2 nvme is not worth the expense. It’s often too fast for games to take advantage of. Sata SSD is good enough that game loading is functionally the same as nvme.
Personally I use a 4tb 7200rpm drive for a lot of my games and don’t have an issue with that
After doing a little reading on set up it seems ZFS is fairly easy to setup (for non-root drives) so potentially I’m looking at:
240GB WD Green M.2 System drive (~£30)
4TB Barracuda/WD RED or Blue HDD with my current Samsung EVO 500GB set up as cache. (~£80 for the HDD).
Which gives me M.2 system performance and 4TB of (hopefully better than raw rust) storage at the same price as the Crucial MX500 1TB M.2… I don’t suppose anyone’s got experience with ZFS on consumer drives in a gaming rig? My assumption (based on zero experience) here is my most played games will end up in the cache with SSD speeds where I want it and lots of storage for movies and older games I might want to come back to later.
