Intel Optane for secondary drive

[Psykicwarrior]

So, the information around Optane varies a lot, I was wondering, will an Optane help my games if I have Windows and all programs running off an SSD and use a HDD for my games?

[Electronics Wizardy]

You can use optane to cache a hdd if you have a supported system, but you can also use any ssd to cache the hdd aswell.

 

How much it will help depends on the games and use case, might not be a big improvement.

[vanished]

Many tests will show that either replacing or adding a cache to your HDD using solid state storage will improve loading times, but the specifics are not too important.  For example, NVMe SSEs do not show any real world benefit over traditional SATA SSDs when it comes to game loading times and performance, and so an Optane drive would be much the same story.  Assuming you're thinking about using Optane as a cache rather than as a dedicated storage drive, the main limiting factor will be how large that cache is and if it can hold all the files you commonly need to access quickly.

[Psykicwarrior]

I havent heard of using an SSD as a HDD cache before other then Optane, will it do it seemlessly? For a while I used Steam Mover to move the games I was currently playing back and forth, but I'd love to have something that just did all that automatically, which would be a perfect excuse for me to finally buy an NVMe for my main drive and use my old SSD as a cache drive. Sucks a bit to have a 9900K and 1080TI and still having to wait 5mins for a game to load cuz its on spinning rust

[vanished]

21 hours ago, Psykicwarrior said:

I havent heard of using an SSD as a HDD cache before other then Optane, will it do it seemlessly? For a while I used Steam Mover to move the games I was currently playing back and forth, but I'd love to have something that just did all that automatically, which would be a perfect excuse for me to finally buy an NVMe for my main drive and use my old SSD as a cache drive. Sucks a bit to have a 9900K and 1080TI and still having to wait 5mins for a game to load cuz its on spinning rust

Unlike optane it won't just be plug and play.  You need to tell the system (BIOS/OS/etc.) that you want the SSD to act as a cache.  I don't believe it's very difficult at all, but I can't give exact instructions as I've never tried it myself.

[Psykicwarrior]

I shall delve into this further once prices return to normal, currently everything is 25-35% more expensive due to that which shan't be named.
I don't mind doing the work to set it up, I actually love that, I just don't want it to be something I have to keep fixing once its up and running.