Comment on How much does storage speed affect your games?
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
It only goes as fast as the slowest component. NVMe SSDs often get bottlenecked by something else. You can find some comparisons out there where people are given blind tests of various setups, and they end up calling a SATA SSD the fastest one.
A few years back, when the difference in price between the two were larger, it was often suggested that the SATA version was good enough. It was hard to argue otherwise for real world experience. Now the price difference is small to non-existent, so just get the NVMe.
Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
I’d rather take two SATAs, I have a cheap docking station with two SATA slots (currently housing hard disks) and putting them together on a RAID0 almost doubles a single one’s performance.
I could buy a docking station with two NVMe slots, it would be wise too, but then again, two NVMe SSDs would be faster than one, and again, it may or may not be worth the slight (potential) increase in price and decrease in reliability - especially considering the diminishing returns.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Any use of RAID0 needs to be thoughtful. You’re doubling the chance of complete data loss from a single drive failure. Can you get all the data on that setup back? For games that you can install off Steam or some other way, that’s fine. But be very careful of what you put on there.
Incidentally, caching servers are another good use case.
Otherwise, RAID0 is better used as a building block for more complex RAID levels, like RAID10.
Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
I know the drawbacks, if I lose anything that I put on RAID0 it’s a minor inconvenience at best - in fact, the two hard drives on RAID0 I mentioned are quite old and I’m not sure how long I can expect them to last (not that I use them often).
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
That’s fine. I want to bring it up because this is a public forum, and it’s important that nobody tries this blind.
mushroomman_toad@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
You’re probably going to have a noticeable performance impact from running games off of USB.
Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
I thought so too, but IME it’s fine
spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 3 days ago
you can buy a 50cc moped and attach a NOS cylinder to it. that might be a fun hobby project, if you’re into it.
but in a drag race, you’re going to get beat by a 10 year old Toyota Prius. because there’s only so much you can eke out of a 50cc engine.
“RAID0 using a cheap 2-slot external enclosure” is one of the more cursed things I’ve ever contemplated. firmly in “just because you can doesn’t mean you should” territory.