Blazing Fast NVMEs and Direct Storage API for PCs *spawn*

Guys, I said "personally".

:p

And please do yourselves a favor and get a cheapo 256GB or 512GB SATA3 SSD to put there the 3/4 games you're currently playing more often. It'll make a world of a difference.
 
There's a difference between having no SSD at all or a SSD with HDD's for storage purposes. It's almost impossible to encounter a laptop user without an SSD. Desktop users have HDD's for storage mostly, with a main drive as ssd.
It's impossible to buy a pc/laptop with just a mechanical spinning drive nowadays.
 
Having compared spindle versus flash, there's no good reason not to have your (active) games on a cheap flash drive. If you're a Steam abuser, add your SSD to your available library storage space, and then you can use Steam to migrate the game(s) back and forth between your drives.

Now, having said that, I also haven't found a significant speed advantage to my PCIe NVMe (Sammy 970 Evo) drive over my much older SATA 6gbps (Sammy 860 Evo) drive. I tested them back-to-back in the same machine and in basically every game I've played recently (Alyx, Prey, Doom, Borderlands, Witcher, Skryim SE, Forza) there wasn't a notable difference in game load speed or level transition speed IMO. I decided to break out Skyrim SE and load it chock-full of mods here recently, and the level load screen is still to the point where you can't actually read whatever the hint says even on my old SATA Sammy 860.
 
Albuquerque said:
Now, having said that, I also haven't found a significant speed advantage to my PCIe NVMe (Sammy 970 Evo) drive over my much older SATA 6gbps (Sammy 860 Evo) drive. I tested them back-to-back in the same machine and in basically every game I've played recently (Alyx, Prey, Doom, Borderlands, Witcher, Skryim SE, Forza) there wasn't a notable difference in game load speed or level transition speed IMO. I decided to break out Skyrim SE and load it chock-full of mods here recently, and the level load screen is still to the point where you can't actually read whatever the hint says even on my old SATA Sammy 860.
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I think developers will have to start designing game/level loading like hibernation to really see massive increases in start up speed.
 
Doesnt seem like it would be PS5 compatible... Why spend so much on something subpar?
 
DavidGraham said:
I have a HUGE gaming collection, can't migrate them all to SSDs, as it would cost a fortune, thus I have 22TB of HDD storage dedicated for them (yeah I am a hoarder). I am waiting for fast NVMe drives with 6TB+ capacities to replace them though.
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Why would you want to Migrate them all to SSD at the moment anyway ? The majority of them wont really see many benefits. You get the SSD's for the new games that can take advantage of them and keep the old stuff on a HDD or 5. Also SSD prices continue to go down, over the next decade I can see huge 10-20TB drives becoming affordable for SSDs.


Also do you keep all the games downloaded at one time ?
 
Albuquerque said:
Turns out, you're now in luck :) Let's be clear though, it was YOU who failed to specify they be affordable hahaha!

https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Rocket-Internal-Performance-SB-RKTQ-8TB/dp/B08957PT2K
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Phew, that's expensive man! Also it's QLC, which I think is far less reliable than any other type of SSD.

eastmen said:
Why would you want to Migrate them all to SSD at the moment anyway ?
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I don't, I can wait till SSDs become reliable enough.
eastmen said:
You get the SSD's for the new games that can take advantage of them and keep the old stuff on a HDD
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Problem is newer games are very large: Gears 4, Forza 7, Call Of Duty Modern Warfare, Final Fantasy XV, Shadow of War, Ark Survival Evolved, Red Dead Redemption 2, Rainbow Si Siege take alone 1.1TB of HDD capacity, and those are just 8 games. Most games now average 70GBs. You definitely need large drives.

eastmen said:
Also do you keep all the games downloaded at one time ?
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Yep, I have hundreds of games that stretch back to the early 2000s, a few earlier than that as well!
 
wow wtf do u do with all of them ? I have a lot of games and I have a 8TB drive full of early 90s and 2000s games with a small collection of 80s stuff. But my god that's a lot of games.

I play differently than you. I play 1 or 2 games at a time. The reason I have so many games now is because of VR and star citizen. I tend to switch between vr games more often
 
DavidGraham said:
Phew, that's expensive man! Also it's QLC, which I think is far less reliable than any other type of SSD.
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Quad-level flash isn't "less reliable", but it does have far lower write endurance than prior devices. However, even with the 8TB model I just posted, you get 1.8PB (230 drive writes) of warrantied endurance. You wouldn't necessarily want to use this QLC drive as your boot device or a place for TEMP or swapfile or hibernation file, but as a secondary storage device for games which you never delete? That's exactly the right use case for QLC.

DavidGraham said:
I don't, I can wait till SSDs become reliable enough.
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Again, these drives are reliable but they don't have the same write endurance. Don't get it twisted, the only reason we have bigger and yet cheaper flash drives is because we're able to cram more bits into the same millimeter of flash memory silicon. Essentially nobody makes true SLC anymore, although pretty much any drive can emulate it (the Sabrent device I linked emulates SLC for up to 25% of the drive for caching purposes.) Even true multi-level flash is uncommon and expensive. Most consumer flash drives these days are either TLC or are migrating to QLC, and on the horizon is PLC (five bits per cell.) I'm confident we will continue finding ways to cram more bits into flash cells beyond PLC.

This isn't specific to PC's either. Imagine what all these console fanbois are going to say when their internal flash drive finally wears out.
 
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DavidGraham said:
Problem is newer games are very large: Gears 4, Forza 7, Call Of Duty Modern Warfare, Final Fantasy XV, Shadow of War, Ark Survival Evolved, Red Dead Redemption 2, Rainbow Si Siege take alone 1.1TB of HDD capacity, and those are just 8 games. Most games now average 70GBs. You definitely need large drives
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You can configure a SSD to act as the cache for another HD, using software.
File access is then APP <- RAM (cache) <- SSD (cache) <- HD.
 
Albuquerque said:
Quad-level flash isn't "less reliable", but it does have far lower write endurance than prior devices. However, even with the 8TB model I just posted, you get 1.8PB (230 drive writes) of warrantied endurance. You wouldn't necessarily want to use this QLC drive as your boot device or a place for TEMP or swapfile or hibernation file, but as a secondary storage device for games which you never delete? That's exactly the right use case for QLC.
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Problem is online games require huge patch files nowadays, they are still infrequent of course, happening at least every two weeks, but if you have a large collection of them, your drive will be consuming precious write cycles constantly.

eastmen said:
wow wtf do u do with all of them ?
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I am a hoarder for good games, I enjoy reminiscing and launching a good old game immediately and enjoy some memories, I am also a gaming tech geek, and tend to do a lot of graphical comparisons and quick benchmarks, so this gaming data base certainly comes in handy.
 
DavidGraham said:
Problem is online games require huge patch files nowadays, they are still infrequent of course, happening at least every two weeks, but if you have a large collection of them, your drive will be consuming precious write cycles constantly.
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I don't think you grasp how many write cycles you have available.

Let's say I gifted you a fiberoptic 1GbE internet connection for use at your home for nothing but downloading every file you can possibly imagine onto your new 8TB QLC flash drive. At one gigabit per second, this will write to your new drive at a rate of ~119 megabytes per second. Let's say you literally never turn off your computer, it just downloads forever at the full gigabit speed, saving it all to that 8TB QLC drive.

Your 8TB QLC drive has "only" 1.8PB of warrantied write endurance.

It will take 16,212,998.04 seconds to wear out the drive.

This is 270,216.63 minutes.

This is 4,503.61 hours.

This is 187.65 days of continuous, non-stop writing. Again, you have to completely empty and then completely refill the drive more than 230 times to finally hit the warrantied write limit.

Go ahead, try to convince me a few 70Gbyte patches are going to ruin the drive. :) What percentage fill is100 gigabytes of the 1.8PB endurance?
 
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