I currently have a 1 TiB NVMe drive that has been hovering at 100 GiB left for the past couple months. I’ve kept it down by deleting a game every couple weeks, but I would like to play something sometime, and I’m running out of games to delete if I need more space.
That’s why I’ve been thinking about upgrading to a 2 TiB drive, but I just saw an interesting forum thread about LVM cache. The promise of having the storage capacity of an HDD with (usually) the speed of an SSD seems very appealing, but is it actually as good as it seems to be?
And if it is possible, which software should be used? LVM cache seems like a decent option, but I’ve seen people say it’s slow. bcache is also sometimes mentioned, but apparently that one can be unreliable at times.
Beyond that, what method should be used? The Arch Wiki page for bcache mentions several options. Some only seem to cache writes, while some aim to keep the HDD idle as long as possible.
Also, does anyone run a setup like this themselves?
I was using this kind of a setup a long time ago with 120GB SSD and 1TB HDD. I’ve found the overall speedup pretty remarkable. It felt like a 1TB SSD most of the time. So, having a cache drive of around 10% of the main drive seems like a good size to cost compromise. Having a cache 50% size of the basic storage feels like a waste to me.
I’ve had no problems with bcache. Been using it for ssd and a 10tb disk for years with btrfs.
For many games, the loading times are not thaaaat different when comparing HDD vs SSD vs NVME. (Depends on how impatient you are tbh.) And it barely affects FPS.
The biggest appeal of NVME/SSD for me is having a snappy OS.
So I would put your rarely played games on a cheap, big HDD and keep your OS and a couple of the most frequent games on the NVME. (In the Steam interface you can easily move the games to a new drive)
I find it to be a much simpler solution than setting up a multi tiered storage system.
Some sources:
https://www.legitreviews.com/game-load-time-benchmarking-shootout-six-ssds-one-hdd_204468
https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-gaming-disk/3
https://www.pcgamer.com/anthem-load-times-tested-hdd-vs-ssd-vs-nvme/
Seconded, move the games to the NVME if you notice slow load times or textures not rendering quickly enough.
…depends what your use pattern is, but I doubt you’d enjoy it.
The problem is the cached data will be fast, but the uncached will, well, be on a hard drive.
If you have enough cached space to keep your OS and your used data on it, it’s great, but if you have enough disk space to keep your OS and used data on it, why are you doing this in the first place?
If you don’t have enough cache drive to keep your commonly used data on it, then it’s going to absolutely perform worse than just buying another SSD.
So I guess if this is ‘I keep my whole steam library installed, but only play 3 games at a time’ kinda usecase, it’ll probably work fine.
For everything else, eh, I probably wouldn’t.
Edit: a good usecase for this is more the ‘I have 800TB of data, but 99% of it is historical and the daily working set of it is just a couple hundred gigs’ on a NAS type thing.
Any reason why you can’t buy a 2TB SSD and have both a 1TB and 2TB? I have another comment on this thread outlining the complexities of caching on Linux.
I don’t have an available slot for another NVMe, and I wanted to avoid SATA because the prices are too similar despite the performance difference.
Do you have any spare pcie slots, you can get m.2 pcie cards
