Question Drive / Drive Tests for Tens of Thousands of Small Files (Less than 1024KB)

[AndrewJacksonZA]

Use case: Planning a PC for my wife to play The Sims 4 with 20+GB of custom content, with low load times.

What drives (or what drive tests in reviews) should I be looking at for this use case? The Sims 4 accesses tens of thousands of really tiny files, for the standard game plus the expansion packs plus all the downloaded custom content.

Currently she's playing on my rig (i7-6700 non-K, 64GB RAM, 6800XT) that stores the game files (30GB) on a 500GB Samsung 750 EVO with the mods on a 500GB Samsung 860 EVO (they're stored in the My Documents directory on my C:\) From my profiling of the game using tools like ProcMon, it appears that reading from disk is a bigger issue than CPU usage.

While having large max throughput numbers are nice, this use case demands responsiveness and the ability to read many tiny files, very quickly. What drives should I be looking at when building her PC, and what tests do people typically run to determine how a drive handles so many thousands of files, please? From my experience doing the installation and maintenance of her mods and custom content, most of them are tiny, about half appearing to be in the sub one megabyte range.

Thank you

 

[Ralston18]

Storage space not being an issue per se. Being able to quickly access all those tiny files being the primary requirement. Correct?

As I understand your post I think I would create a virtual/RAM disk in memory and copy those thousands of really tiny files to that virtual disk.

Not sure that the stated 64 GB RAM would be enough to host such a drive. How much RAM can your (or her future build) support?

And/or how the path to all those tiny files virtual disk files gets incorporated into the Sims 4 game play.

A virtual machine may be another way to go about it.

Just my thoughts on the matter.