Raid 0 with sata SSDs for games - Good idea or not?

[Lord Flashheart]

Hi all
So it is steam sale time and have been splashing out a bit on my game collection.
I am sure many others have.
It means storage space is gradually being used.

My spec:
AMD 3600X CPU
MSI B450 tomahawk motherboard
Gigabyte GTX 1080 ti GPU
850w High current gamer antec PSU
2560 x 1080 144hz gsync monitor
Adata 256 GB NVMe SX8200 pro for the boot drive.
An old 240 GB Hard drive for general storage.
2 x 1TB samsung QVO 860 drives in striped (raid 0) config for games.
Windows 10 professional OS.

It is really a gaming only machine with no critical or important information on there. I have a linux based machine for anything important.

I had one sata SSD for games but was running low on space so decided to get another. All the games were backed up to an external HD, the striped drive created and the games copied back.

My '"upgrade plan" is to get 2 more 1TB SSDs & a 4TB hard drive for a backup.

It will mean 4 x 1TB samsung QVO 860 drives in striped raid 0 as a single 4TB logical drive for games. I will use windows to create the striped volume (and not fake hardware raid 0). The 4TB hard drive can be its backup accessed through my external docking station I already have and backup periodically.

They will be QVO drives so cannot endure very many writes but they seem ok for storing games. The highest write speed required will be copying from a hard drive. There will be the usual steam game updates but doubt that is a massive daily drive write situation especially spread over 4 drives.

Also I will use an old raid card I have to attach to the hard drive (240GB one).

It will improve load times compared a single sata SSD but that is not my biggest priority. It seems games are getting very big in size and lots of storage is needed. Taking the drives I have back for replacement is not an option and there are no more NVMe slots on the motherboard.

So then is having 4 1TB SSDs (quad level cell drives) in raid 0 a good idea for storing games?

Useful & informed info is appreciated.

[L37]

The issue is, R0 does not really improve access time and random IO. It even can introduce additional delays (because of inevitable overhead).
Linear speeds should be improved (helping a bit with slow writes) and obviously the main advantage is being able to consolidate everything into single volume.

I'd say it will work fine, just do not expect any performance gains and be careful about not loosing data.

[OLDMAN🎅]

SSDs speed of about 550 megabytes per second

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Pointless

[Lord Flashheart]

Bad 💀 Motha eredeti hozzászólása:

Pointless

Why? Backed up by what evidence? What else can I do when the space runs out that is cost effective?

[Komrade]

Mamba Bajamba eredeti hozzászólása:

Bad 💀 Motha eredeti hozzászólása:

Pointless

Why? Backed up by what evidence?

Virtually zero difference in load times with raid compared to a regular SSD. And if one drive fails, so does the whole array.

Mamba Bajamba eredeti hozzászólása:

Bad 💀 Motha eredeti hozzászólása:

Pointless

What else can I do when the space runs out that is cost effective?

Simply buy a new HDD or SSD.

[Lord Flashheart]

notkennyS eredeti hozzászólása:

Mamba Bajamba eredeti hozzászólása:

Why? Backed up by what evidence?

Virtually zero difference in load times with raid compared to a regular SSD. And if one drive fails, so does the whole array.

Mamba Bajamba eredeti hozzászólása:

What else can I do when the space runs out that is cost effective?

Simply buy a new HDD or SSD.

Thank you for the reply

From my initial post:

'"It is really a gaming only machine with no critical or important information on there. I have a linux based machine for anything important.""

and

"It will improve load times compared a single sata SSD but that is not my biggest priority. It seems games are getting very big in size and lots of storage is needed""

Hard drives are way are too slow for games & want 4TB storage for games. I do not care who agrees if I need that or not.

So the cheapest 4TB I can find locally is around $800 Australian.
2 new 1TB drives at $165 so can pay another $330 instead if I were going ahead.

Oh and wish to bring your attention to my last line of the post:

"Useful & informed info is appreciated.""


Thank you!

[Komrade]

Mamba Bajamba eredeti hozzászólása:

notkennyS eredeti hozzászólása:

Virtually zero difference in load times with raid compared to a regular SSD. And if one drive fails, so does the whole array.


Simply buy a new HDD or SSD.

Thank you for the reply

From my initial post:

'"It is really a gaming only machine with no critical or important information on there. I have a linux based machine for anything important.""

and

"It will improve load times compared a single sata SSD but that is not my biggest priority. It seems games are getting very big in size and lots of storage is needed""

Hard drives are way are too slow for games & want 4TB storage for games. I do not care who agrees if I need that or not.

So the cheapest 4TB I can find locally is around $800 Australian.
2 new 1TB drives at $165 so can pay another $330 instead if I were going ahead.

Oh and wish to bring your attention to my last line of the post:

"Useful & informed info is appreciated.""


Thank you!

No problem. And no one will judge you, everyone has different storage needs.

https://au.pcpartpicker.com/list/G22Zmq

2 options, you can go with one of each or 2 of the same. If possible get the 660p as it's an nvme drive and faster than ssds.

[L37]

One interesting question would be - what's better in this case - actual raid0 or jbod? Might be worth testing, because windows soft raid implementation is far from the best one, i've seen 100% single thread cpu load and way less then expected speeds on raid10 configurations before, and jbod theoretically should have no overhead and should be equal to single ssd speed.

Other than that it is totally not pointless. With 80-100GB games it will effectively save something like ~300-400GB of space since you would not have to maintain 4 separate volumes with at least enough free space for a single game so that updates work.

[Lord Flashheart]

L37 eredeti hozzászólása:

One interesting question would be - what's better in this case - actual raid0 or jbod? Might be worth testing, because windows soft raid implementation is far from the best one, i've seen 100% single thread cpu load and way less then expected speeds on raid10 configurations before, and jbod theoretically should have no overhead and should be equal to single ssd speed.

Other than that it is totally not pointless. With 80-100GB games it will effectively save something like ~300-400GB of space since you would not have to maintain 4 separate volumes with at least enough free space for a single game so that updates work.

Good question which is better in windows jbod or raid 0.

I am guessing it is raid 0.
With raid 0 there are measurable increases in read speeds especially with sequential reads. It will have game loading time improvements with some games but are not that worried about it.

As for random access I am unsure. My guess is there is an improvement also.
There is extra overhead with windows raid 0 but the load is spread over multiple drives - meaning multiple controllers used , & more SLC cache which may counteract the windows overhead.
It is just speculation.

My main concern is there may be a chance of the raid failing due to a drive failure but the writes are spread over 4 drives, each with wear levelling & caching.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

All raid with ssds will do is hurt your available space, not help it in any ways. And Raid-0 can't increase much to make a worth doing difference when using ssds, which are already 10-50X faster then mechanical drives already.

If the game is helped some how by a faster ssd, stick that game on an NVME SSD. But many games won't even benefit from being on m2/sata ssd, let alone an nvme ssd.

[_I_]

nvme beats raid, and makes very little difference in games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voDksFWJ2H8

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Nvme makes for a good fast drive to use for video recording, editing.

[Lord Flashheart]

Bad 💀 Motha eredeti hozzászólása:

All raid with ssds will do is hurt your available space, not help it in any ways. And Raid-0 can't increase much to make a worth doing difference when using ssds, which are already 10-50X faster then mechanical drives already.

If the game is helped some how by a faster ssd, stick that game on an NVME SSD. But many games won't even benefit from being on m2/sata ssd, let alone an nvme ssd.

From my initial post:

"It will improve load times compared a single sata SSD but that is not my biggest priority. It seems games are getting very big in size and lots of storage is needed. Taking the drives I have back for replacement is not an option and there are no more NVMe slots on the motherboard"