I have 500gb SSD and need to basically uninstall Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3 to install Baldur’s Gate 3. I want to buy new SSD, but my money is a bit tight right now as I’m saving for my degree’s tuition fee.
I’m thinking of buying 3x500GB spinning HDD that will cost me around $20. I know it wont be as fast as SSD, but I read/watched about RAID, and saw amazing result. Around 400-500MBPs, which should be more than enough for gaming, imo. If I were to buy the same amount of storage but SSD, it will cost me $100.
I dont really need redundancy, as all of my personal documents are backed up in my server and I have separate disk just for my data archieve. It will only be used to game and game only.
Do you think that my idea makes sense? Is it does…, I want to ask another questions.
I knew I wanted to use RAID 0, but after I read arch wiki, it says that RAID 5 is superior. Should I use BTRFS, EXT4, ZFS, or F2FS? What kernel or module should I use?
Raid 0 on 3x500GB triples your failure rate (especially important on older drives, as I presume these are), and still won’t get anywhere near an SSD in speed.
You could just mount the 3 drives separately and have storage that way, which means if one fails you’ve still got the data on the other two… it’d still suck but not as bad as losing everything.
If it was me I’d wait until I could afford the SSD… it’ll be many times faster and newer.
I mean it’s worth a shot. OP knows that much. If it works out, it’d tide them over until they get a new ssd
I will only use it for game data. I highly value my personal data so I wont put anything remote to worthy in it, I have nas, separate drive, and even Google Drive. If it fails, the worst thing that will happen is I need to redownload all my games from Steam. It will be a bummer, but I think I should be able to restore the first game in matter of hours. My save data will be saved on Steam anyway.
Yeah, single hdd is only around 150mbps, not bad, but I saw 4 hdd can get to 600mbps, which is in realm of sata ssd. I’m just thinking to giving a shot, beside it’s only $20. If one fail, I still have 1tb.
Sequential speeds aren’t the only metric for storage performance though. Random reads are quite important and the HDDs will literally be hundreds of times slower than an SSD for random reads. It may be fine for older games if you’re fine with waiting for a minute at each loading screen, but some modern games now require SSDs and that number will likely skyrocket soon.
agreed. games read a lot of random data. performance won’t be nearly as ‘good’ as op expects.
the difference of $50 matters that much for op, i think that not spending anything would be the more prudent choice.
that said, if it were me i’d raid-0 two of them and keep the third as a single drop-in replacement for when that array dies; containing a full backup of the array’s contents kept up-to-date with every major patch the games on it gets.
In that case a 3 drive RAID-5 is what you want. One drive dies you lose nothing but redundancy. You still get two drives with of data along with parity checking. It isn’t quite as fast as a zero, depending on hardware (most will max the HDD speed before being bottlenecks). Nothing will be as fast for random reads as an SSD or NVME, but you get the storage and piece of mind.
Yeah, I’m mega broke right now, lol. For reference, $50 for average people is around 8 days worth of salary here. And I’m unfortunately, an average people.
This is what I do. I have a massive old-school hard drive and I use it for things like Rimworld or various indie games. It’s honestly manageable for some more-demanding stuff, but if I try to run anything intensive, I might as well not play it, at all. The old-school drive is great for anything Steamdeck level or below, basically.
Are you accounting for stuff like SATA cables and cradle mounts for the HDDs in your cost calculation?
You can have separate disks attached to your Steam installation. You don’t need RAID at all for that.
That RAID would be the separate disks. I surely wont use it to be my / or /home disks, it’s too risky. 3x500mb should give me theoretically 300-400mbps of sequential read/write.
If you really need the speed, sure, go ahead, but I suspect you won’t actually get that speed unless on very large sequential files.