Gaming PC... designed around storage??

I have an Optane 900p for the OS and applications, and 4x 2 TB NVMe striped in Storage Spaces (effectively RAID 0) for games and data. I incrementally backup to a single 10 TB HDD cached by another Optane 900p so the daily backup only takes a few minutes. You can use Intel Cache Acceleration Software for free with an Intel SSD.

I abandoned RAID 5 due to poor performance even with a hardware raid card. You need a write cache of several hundred GB for it to be fast with the size of today's games and movies. Since I had an Optane 900p cache, there was no need for RAID 5 and a single HDD was sufficient.
 
Tived - I understand now, thanks for clearing that up.

Well I stil want to keep my OS on a separate drive, so if needed, I can reformat and not really lose anything. That was the whole point of putting My documents/desktop/downloads/apps in a different place. But now my head's all over the place w/abandoning the RAID5 idea. And again, I can only really do that if I spring for a 8TB something.. because I'm not going lower than 4TB. I think I'm buying into ya'lls kool aid that an NVMe just won't fail, so I'm trying to distance myself from the need for hardware redundancy.

Ok.. so here's plan #490834:

OS: 1TB SATA SSD
Video encode/archive: 2TB SATA/m.2
Files/download/apps/desktop: 2TB SATA/m.2
Games: 8TB NVMe

SATA SSD is plenty fast enough for OS, and probably for video/files/download/apps/desktop. Might do m.2 for video thing just because it's read/write intensive. I can't really imagine why I would need blazing speed for f/d/a/d, but the m.2 prices for a 2TB are only slightly more. Would be an upgrade in space for everything, which was one goal. I have more space allocated to f/d/a/d, but I don't use it. And with all of this, I'm actually rethinking my logical drive scheme a bit as well... for backup... yeah, I know, the thing I said I wasn't interested in revisiting at all. The reason I'd change things around, is because QNAP can't do a backup at drive level, only at folder level. So instead of going F: for files, D: for downloads, I'd probably put them all under F, and just have root level folders, like F:/F for files, F:/D for downloads... etc.

With all of that being said.. I think I can handle this format w/the available lanes from the AMD platform?? So what's a good gaming mobo that can give me 4x m.2 lanes, w/one being 4x4?

Also.. I don't know why I haven't attached this sooner, but I included a pic of my logical drives, and in the quick accss, you can see the mappings.
 

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Yes AMD x570 can handle it.
As I said in my first post I'm running 4x NVME SSDs and 6 (soon to be 7) SATA HDDs as well as a videocard and it's all smooth.

4x4 nvme is 16 lanes and the videocard uses the other 8 lanes for the total of 24.

I'm running both a media server and a minecraft server off this machine as well as using it as my main gaming and productivity machine and unless I'm transcoding while simultaneously trying to game there are no bottlenecks*.

*Though I've noticed my minecraft mapping software has been hitting over 16GB of ram use when a lot of people are playing simultaneously, but that's not relevant and is a super fringe case.

Your drive list is nothing compared to mine, I'm up to like 16 unique drive letters.
 
I don’t understand the desire to have sata for your OS drive when nvme is literally a few dollars more for significantly more speed.

Even a basic NVME will double the speed of SATA.

I feel you would be better off with an 8 and a 4, then partition the 4 for OS/video, or 2tb/2tb, so you can format the OS partition.

Alternativey 1x1tb, 1x4tb NVME and an 8tb

For the record, I think 8tb is excessive for a game drive, and I get by comfortably with 500gb/1tb, with plenty to spare. I also think 2tb of apps is excessive, and have never ever needed that even when I have had everything installed I can think of.

I am me though, and you should do what works for you.
 
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Yeah, since Sly mentions running 4 NVMes as is, I'll probably do an NVMe for the OS, because you're right, they're only a little more.

As far as the other stuff, the reason the video is on it's own drive is because of the IO requests while buffering. At that point, speed doesn't matter, because the bottle neck is the fact that lowkey/OBS is requesting IO at the same time the game is. Moving that to a discrete drive eliminates that bottle neck. The 2TB isn't just for apps, it's for basically everything that isn't OS/games. As you can see from my image, I'm already out of space for 4TB of games, and that's with having to delete some to make room for others, and not having room to install more. Most of my OS drive is also taken up w/games. I have a lot of different interests and friend groups that play different things, so there are a lot of things I have installed. Also, I don't see games getting any smaller. There's no way in the world I could get by on 500GB/1TB for game storage.
 
You can do OBS video buffering and real time transcoding on an NVME drive that has other stuff going on. I do it all the time. You could likely use the OS or even game drive with zero performance consequences. Good NVME have ridiculous throughput and the IO bottlenecks are basically a long gone limitation of SATA.

When I'm talking about gaming and transcoding creating a bottleneck, I don't mean real time OBS transcoding for streaming this machine handles that like a champ. I'm talking about converting raw 4K HDR through h.265 using handbrake that uses 100% of all 24 threads in my system for hours.
 
Yah have you seen how many IOPS these NVME drives have?

Half decent NVME drives are in the 300-600k range, some go up well beyond this, eg the 980 pro which does 1M. SATA drives (non enterprise) go up to about 100k

There is nothing stopping you having a 4tb drive and partitioning it halfway instead of having two 2tb drives, I assure you, the speed will be sufficient for your purposes.

The only time games hit SSDs hard is during loading, and usually this is just for a second or two.
 
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Keljian said:
Yah have you seen how many IOPS these NVME drives have?

Half decent NVME drives are in the 300-600k range, some go up well beyond this, eg the 980 pro which does 1M. SATA drives (non enterprise) go up to about 100k

There is nothing stopping you having a 4tb drive and partitioning it halfway instead of having two 2tb drives, I assure you, the speed will be sufficient for your purposes.

The only time games hit SSDs hard is during loading, and usually this is just for a second or two.
Click to expand...

On second thought, here is my revised recommendation:

Just get a big (8tb+) fast spinner (WD Black or WD Gold) with fast 1tb NVME cache to use for primo (samsung 980 pro/WD SN850 (w/heatsink - unless the motherboard you have comes with a heatsink for it), cause it'd be cheaper and just as fast, or faster after the first cache fill. Get 2tb for the NVME if you want/can afford it.

The reason I say this is because games have videos and other assets that aren't accessed heavily and they will just take up space on expensive storage. Being that you have so much storage linked to games, it makes sense that you use it more optimally.

Get a 4tb Sabrient rocket (plus or Q4) for your 2TB/2TB situation, or if it is cheaper, just get 2x2TB drives.

Get extra ram for caching (32gb extra, more if you want as it's inexpensive these days).

Set the block size to 4kb, as this is where SSDs fall over.


Summary:
  • Games drive: 1x 8tb (or bigger, they go up to 10tb) WD Black. If you need more, WD Gold go up to 18tb.
  • OS/Video: 4tb Sabrient rocket Q4 or 2x2tb Sabrient rocket plus
  • Cache drive: 1x 1tb Samsung 980 pro/WD SN850 with heatsink
  • Cache memory: +32gb ram
Primocache setup:
  • 32 gb L1 memory cache (R/W for Games/Video, Read only for OS/applications)
  • 1tb L2 ssd cache
  • 4kb block size
  • Intelligent write enabled
  • L2 turned off for OS drive/applications etc drive (test first, could be worth leaving it on)
  • Prefetch enabled

Done.
 
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What Kelijan posted sounds pretty ideal and I would doing extremely similar if I wasn't slowly upgrading my PC over time.

64GB of ram with 32 of it being cache is more than you possibly need, but I'm actually upgrading to 64GB myself (about 24 of it's gonna be cache.)

If you need help setting up Primocache I can help you out. There's gonna be some overhead but with 64GB total you won't notice it. It's very set and forget in a good way.
 
TheSlySyl said:
What Kelijan posted sounds pretty ideal and I would doing extremely similar if I wasn't slowly upgrading my PC over time.

64GB of ram with 32 of it being cache is more than you possibly need, but I'm actually upgrading to 64GB myself (about 24 of it's gonna be cache.)

If you need help setting up Primocache I can help you out. There's gonna be some overhead but with 64GB total you won't notice it. It's very set and forget in a good way.
Click to expand...

32 gb is less than $100USD at the moment, for the benefit he would receive with such a setup, that's tiny. He could go more, it depends on how much data he frequently uses.

I have taken the tactic of “when I need memory, free it, otherwise use it for cache”
 
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