My Steam Library is in NVME drive. Why Do I Get "Consider Upgrading to SSD" Message?

[Grayson Peddie]

In my Linux machine (Pika-OS), I have OBS, GNOME Terminal, and Firefox running. I'm not doing any streaming or recording but I kept it running in case I want do some recording of a video in the future.

The performance of my SSD is fine and I have not experienced much of a slowdown, so why did I get an "HDD Limitation" message telling me to upgrading to the SSD even though I already have it for my Steam Library? The TALOS Principle 2 is in the Steam Library already and it's in my NVME drive.

The only thread that I found is the "System Reqs" thread and I have not read the entire thread, so please pardon me if the answer to my question is already in that thread, but I thought I might ask.

[eispfogel]

I had this message too and i have only NVMe drives in my PC.
Strange!

Maybe i read it wrong and it was only a warning, that when i run the game from an hdd, the performance will suffer?

[Grayson Peddie]

No, you read it right. I believe this warning is a false positive.

[playful_tux]

You might want to monitor latencies on your NVMe SSD, just in case there really is something unexpected happening.

The NVMe interface can be very fast, but specific SSD drives can be slow, either occasionnally or even often. It could be that the flash chips are actually slow, or that the flash controller is performing some garbage collection (usually this follows a recent burst of writes).

You could for instance run this command in a terminal, assuming your drive is /dev/nvme0n1:

> iostat -dtx 1 nvme0n1

Pay attention to values for all the "*_await" columns, those indicate latencies for various requests to the drive. r_await (reads) is usually the most important, as it is the most likely to directly impact an application (the other request types can usually be issued asynchronously).

[Grayson Peddie]

What should be the lowest average for r_await in iostat? Around 0.6 or so?

Update: I had Firefox closed and it's at 0.00. With OBS running I'm still at 0.00. It seems Firefox reads from the NVMe drive which causes a bit of a latency issue... Anyway, thank you for your help.

Update 2: I'm thinking it might be a good idea to have another NVMe drive just for Steam games in order to keep the latency low. I already have one for boot/OS drive and another NVMe drive for my /home partition. Maybe one day I might add one...

[playful_tux]

FWIW I'm also on Linux, with all my partitions on the same NVMe drive, not a particularly fast one (Kingston NV2), often Firefox is still running when I start TTP2, my CPU belongs in a museum (i5 3570k), and I never got this warning. So I wouldn't think you need more drives.

I don't know exactly what triggers the warning you got, so I am not sure what you should be looking for: it could be that it's because a performance measurement (in the game code) doesn't meet some expectations (IMHO that's hard to get right), or it could be that the device name as presented to the code via Proton/Wine doesn't look like an SSD.

Does it warn every time? If so, then I'd assume it's caused by some bogus device name. If it's irregular, then I'd assume it's some kind of measurement, and a warning is given above some arbitrary threshold for latency.

Now, if we assume it's the game measuring drive latency...

If your r_await (i.e. the MAX for this column, over several minutes) is always below 1ms then I think the warning is definitely bogus and can be safely ignored. If you see peaks above 5ms then *maybe* that's what triggers the warning? If it's above 20ms then I think it's worth investigating, for instance try and turn off every program you can, or keep iostat running and try to identify when peaks occur, and what is running at the same time.

A little bit of noise is normal (especially if some writes occur, as they occasionally trigger GC in the SSD), trouble is if you see comparatively high latency for several seconds consecutively.

In any case, if you only see a warning and feel no problem with the game, then you're probably doing fine.

[Grayson Peddie]

Yeah, I have never experienced much of a lag in the game and it's all smooth, so I'm going to ignore the warning and move on. Thanks.

[Gweihir]

Probably just a detection bug. For me the game complains I have old video drivers, which is not true (well, it is true for the integrated GPU which is disabled).

[👾]

I'm running it from a regular HDD, got the warning, but the game runs fine. No excessive waiting or stutter or anything. Makes me wonder why it's there in the first place, just a precaution maybe?