Game drive options...

Gerr · June 9, 2017

In my current gaming rig, I have a 250GB boot drive, a 1TB 7200rpm HDD, and a 64GB SSD used as a cache for that HDD. I have Steam and all games installed on that HDD. Even with the SSD cache, I still notice long load times, especially at new cut scenes. I am currently playing Witcher 3, which has a ton of cut scenes, and it's getting annoying.

I was wondering if a pure SSD game drive would speed things up by a good amount, or little to none? I have a pair of 250GB SSD's I could setup in RAID-0 for a 500GB pure SSD game drive. It's not as much game storage as my 1TB HDD, but I think it would be faster. I could use the HDD as a back up drive instead in case my boot drive or RAID-0 game drive crashes for any reason. Just wondering if I would see enough of a speed increase to make it worth it.

Leonius · June 9, 2017

57 minutes ago, Gerr said:

In my current gaming rig, I have a 250GB boot drive, a 1TB 7200rpm HDD, and a 64GB SSD used as a cache for that HDD. I have Steam and all games installed on that HDD. Even with the SSD cache, I still notice long load times, especially at new cut scenes. I am currently playing Witcher 3, which has a ton of cut scenes, and it's getting annoying.

I was wondering if a pure SSD game drive would speed things up by a good amount, or little to none? I have a pair of 250GB SSD's I could setup in RAID-0 for a 500GB pure SSD game drive. It's not as much game storage as my 1TB HDD, but I think it would be faster. I could use the HDD as a back up drive instead in case my boot drive or RAID-0 game drive crashes for any reason. Just wondering if I would see enough of a speed increase to make it worth it.

yes there will be a significant increase in load times when coming from the cached hdd, but only if the drive speed is actually the limiting factor here (which is farely likely). I recently transferred several big games to a ssd and load times got shorter by about one half of what they were ish.

Gerr · June 9, 2017

Am I able to have Steam as well as the current games I am playing on the SSD and then "move" older games I no longer play or won't play often onto a HDD?

PrimeSonic · June 9, 2017

18 minutes ago, Gerr said:

Am I able to have Steam as well as the current games I am playing on the SSD and then "move" older games I no longer play or won't play often onto a HDD?

Yes. You can have multiple locations for your Steam games.

That's somewhere in the settings.

You can also have Steam move your games from one drive to another so you don't run into any issues later.

I'd give you more detail but I don't have Steam on this machine I'm typing from.