2TB SSD options for new gaming box

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Cobra

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I'm building a new Kaby Lake i7-7700K gaming machine for myself. I mostly play games and do general computer work (office, internet browsing, video watching, MP3s, etc). I'm having a little difficulty deciding what storage configuration to use. I need 2TB to store my games (to give you an idea even with 2TB I will have to delete/re-download titles occasionally as new stuff comes out that I want to play). I have ~$700 I can spend on storage. I really want to go all SSD with no split drive ssd/hdd windows/storage setup like I have on my current machine.

I can do the Crucial MX300 2TB for ~$550, the Samsung 850 EVO 2TB for ~$700, or I can do two Intel 600p NVME M.2 1TB in a 2TB RAID 0 array for ~$700.

I'm leaning towards the Intel 600p RAID setup as it seems to have the best performance for the price despite the complexity. Opinions?
 
If you're looking at a 2TB SSD, how much data do you plan on storing on average?

It sounds like you're filling 2TB as it is. That SSD won't be so quick if you're going to be keeping it near full.
 
Honestly, if you need the storage. You're probably better off doing a smaller NVMe(960 evo) boot drive for teh speeeds and that Crucial MX300 2tb for your games and stuff. Of course you will have to deal with the split drives, but you will have plenty and it won't bog down like it would if you loaded the OS drive completely up.
 
What's your backup game like? With either of your three choices if you lose a disk you're screwed. And desktop raid 0 is overkill.
 
Track Drew said:
If you're looking at a 2TB SSD, how much data do you plan on storing on average?

It sounds like you're filling 2TB as it is. That SSD won't be so quick if you're going to be keeping it near full.
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Right now I'm at about ~1.3TB not including my misc downloads, pics and music files which I'm going to move to an external HDD for storage.

walwalka said:
Honestly, if you need the storage. You're probably better off doing a smaller NVMe(960 evo) boot drive for teh speeeds and that Crucial MX300 2tb for your games and stuff. Of course you will have to deal with the split drives, but you will have plenty and it won't bog down like it would if you loaded the OS drive completely up.
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This is an option, but I really want to avoid split drives if possible... it's a waste in my current setup. Out of my current 512GB 850 Pro I'm only using 65GB... that's OS, program files, and documents (but not pictures, movies, music, or games, which are all on a 4TB spinner). I'm tired of moving my 3 most played games back and forth between the slow drive and the fast drive using symbolic links. Rather just have it all in one spot. I'm also having that Win10 freezing issue intermittently due to having my libraries on the second drive... it started after the anniversary update and they supposedly fixed it but it still hits me after major updates and sometimes just randomly.

gigatexal said:
What's your backup game like? With either of your three choices if you lose a disk you're screwed. And desktop raid 0 is overkill.
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I have an external drive with a backup of my docs, pics, movies and music, and I also have those backed up on 2 other computers in my household. I have a Macrium Reflect image of my system drive, but I could very easily rebuild it. I don't have my games backed up, but I don't worry about it much because I could just re-download them one by one as I wanted to play them in the rare event of failure.
 
Cobra said:
This is an option, but I really want to avoid split drives if possible... it's a waste in my current setup. Out of my current 512GB 850 Pro I'm only using 65GB... that's OS, program files, and documents (but not pictures, movies, music, or games, which are all on a 4TB spinner). I'm tired of moving my 3 most played games back and forth between the slow drive and the fast drive using symbolic links. Rather just have it all in one spot. I'm also having that Win10 freezing issue intermittently due to having my libraries on the second drive... it started after the anniversary update and they supposedly fixed it but it still hits me after major updates and sometimes just randomly.
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I was noticing a similar issue with my HTPC, but it seemed to have gotten better with me swapping my storage drive to an SSD from a magnetic drive.
 
Get the mx300 and put the extra 200 into an even beefier gpu or something I doubt you'll see that much of a boost from ahci and nvme
 
gigatexal said:
Get the mx300 and put the extra 200 into an even beefier gpu or something I doubt you'll see that much of a boost from ahci and nvme
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The MX300 is a really good deal. It does show significant performance decreases from the 850 EVO in benchmarks but I don't know if they would be noticeable in the real world. So far I have all Samsung SSDs and I've never had a problem, I just wish they didn't charge so much more for the name. Ideally I'd love to do a 960 EVO but there is no way I'm paying $1600 for it. I'm spending just as much for storage as I am for my 1080 GTX and that already seems kind of crazy.
 
Whatever you decide, I personally love putting only the OS and main apps on a dedicated drive. even a 128GB is plenty and very cheap. Then you can do images, restores, reinstalls, etc of that drive easily and quickly while leaving all your games on the other volume never having to touch them.
 
Here is an idea.

1. Get a 2TB+ HDD
2. Get a smaller SSD to set up as a cache for the HDD
3. Choose between these two caching options
a. Use the built in z270 SSD caching - not sure of the size limit... the older chipset limit used to be 64GB. Looks like there may be Optane (PCI-e based) cache devices in maybe 16GB and 32GB for the Z270 chipset boards.
b. Buy a copy of MAXVeloSSD Professional (256GB limit) and set up the SSD caching with it. - $20
https://www.elitebytes.com/MaxVeloSSD.aspx

My current motherboard supports SSD caching through the Marvell SATA chipset. Works fine and I haven't noticed any downsides compared to MAXVeloSSD.

SSD caching is way, way cheaper AND you will not notice any perfomance difference unless you are running benchmark programs.

The way it works, is that is copies the most used stuff to the SSD.

The first time you use something in a long time, it will be at only HDD speed levels IF the cache is full of other more recently used files, but it will then copy it to the SSD and you will be back in business performance wise.
 
If you go the cache route, another good choice is Primocache with it's 2TB ssd size limit, then you can get say a 1TB NVME and pair it with a nice large drive. You have to manually set the program to specify x% to keep in the cache. That's always a good option for some people. The thing about that route though is I don't know how much it will help in the beginning on big games with large maps, especially modded ones with aftermarket models and textures. It could be almost like you'd have to play the whole game to get it thoroughly loaded in the cache before you'd get the benefits.
 
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rive22 said:
If you go the cache route, another good choice is Primocache with it's 2TB ssd size limit, then you can get say a 1TB NVME and pair it with a nice large drive. You have to manually set the program to specify x% to keep in the cache. That's always a good option for some people. The thing about that route though is I don't know how much it will help in the beginning on big games with large maps, especially modded ones with aftermarket models and textures. It could be almost like you'd have to play the whole game to get it thoroughly loaded in the cache before you'd get the benefits.
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The texture packs are usually all in one big file.. so as long as that file gets loaded, it should stick the whole thing into cache.
 
cyclone3d said:
The texture packs are usually all in one big file.. so as long as that file gets loaded, it should stick the whole thing into cache.
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That's a good point. Most of the games I've modded at least either replace the main files or are split in multiple chunks by type or map location, etc, but you're right as long as any part of the particular file was triggered the whole thing would load, so that could work pretty good.
 
I'm going to have to do some research on the caching. I have customers that have this setup on their laptops from the factory and I hate it when I'm trying to do data recovery for them because you never know where the data is. Anyone know how does this work with imaging software?
 
Just get a Crucial mx300 and call it a day. The vast majority can't tell the difference between various SSDs in actual usage anyway (yes, that includes PCI-E/M2 vs SATA - let's not even talk about RAID).
And as has been shown by someone on [H], most games are bound by other things than storage speed now that we have moved on from HDDs (CPU single threaded performance seems to be a particularly big deal, as I had noticed myself many years ago when trying out RAMdisks for gaming). Heck, there's still plenty of games that don't even load noticeably faster on a SSD/RAMdisk versus a 7200 rpm HDD.

Keep the rest of the money for GPU/CPU upgrades.
 
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Cobra said:
I'm going to have to do some research on the caching. I have customers that have this setup on their laptops from the factory and I hate it when I'm trying to do data recovery for them because you never know where the data is. Anyone know how does this work with imaging software?
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Generally, the cache drive is invisible to the user, it is all done in the background.

With MaxVeloSSD, you can still see the drive, but the cache image is just one big file. You can use any remaining space on the drive for whatever.

Everything on the cache drive should exist on the drive being cached.

When putting an image on a system that is cached, you would just image the normal drive and the set up the caching afterwards.. just like the caching would normally be set up.
 
I vote for the 2TB Crucial MX300 as well. I'm not a fan of caching and RAID on home computers, I'd rather keep things simple.
 
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