What Drive Should I Get? (Having trouble with large game updates now with old drives)

[QFAN]

TLDR:  I'm looking to upgrade a SATA SSD. Preferably 4TB or above with high sustained write speed (no need to worry about write cache exhaustion).

 

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My current system has 660p and sn750 occupying all NVME slots. There are also mechanical drives and MX300 on SATA.

 

Now with more games going above 50GB, sometimes 100GB, and early-access games doing frequent updates, I noticed an issue: when STEAM downloads a large differential update (small download in a few to 10 GB range over network) that requires large continuous writes (usually overwriting all files of the game, 50-100GB data to disk), the games on MX300 and 660p will have trouble applying the patch, slowing down to 30MB/s or so after the first few minutes. So the patch takes forever to apply.

 

My 660p is sort of OK for now. sn750 is used for media files. So my first upgrade option would be a new SATA SSD replacing the MX300.

 

Are there 4TB or higher capacity SATA SSDs that can do over 400GB continuous writes at full SATAIII speed?

 

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Below are some screenshots of large file copy slow down. This behaviour is the same as I see when STEAM updates large games on these drives.

 

Copy large files to MX300:

 

 

Copy large files to intel 660p

[jaslion]

Thats normal and happens on all drives. When the cache is full it writes directly to flash. If the flash is slower it's gonna be slower and both of those drives are slower drives.

 

23 minutes ago, QFAN said:

Are there 4TB or higher capacity SATA SSDs that can do over 400GB continuous writes at full SATAIII speed?

Not that are reasonable price

[NobleGamer]

In order to get a SSD with sustained sequential write speeds of 400 MBps after filling cache, the two main choices are an enterprise/high end SATA SSD, or a mid end nvme pcie 3 or 4 SSD.

 

Just be aware that the former might be more expensive than the latter. Benchmarks with sustained write graphs can help confirm which drives make the cut.

 

If this sustained write benchmark of many common 1 TB drives is any indication, it's not difficult to get over 400 MBps sustained with nvme. Doing it for SATA likely requires higher performing flash and/or controller than what's typically in consumer SATA drives.

[QFAN]

Thanks.

 

Looks like there's no ideal SATA SSD for me.

Probably I should just go for internal soft RAID (either SSD or mechanical would work.)