Question Is it possible to have 2 disks, one writing and the other reading, synchronized?

[Santiago Andrea]

Is it possible to use two disks, one for reading and the other for writing and that they are synchronized, similar to mirrored RAID 1?

but I need little writing, so it would be a smaller disk

I have 2 disks
Disk A-Read Only (1TB)
Disk B-Write Only (120GB)

I read Windows Server WriteBack Cache somewhere, but there is very little information. Specifically, Disk A would redirect the writing to Disk B, without causing error

Thank you so much

 

[Ralston18]

So you want information being read from Disk A to be written to Disk B?

But not all of that information - just some subset perhaps. Correct?

How is it determined that that "little information" is identified and then captured/redirected to Disk B?

More information needed.

 

[USAFRet]

How does data get on the 1TB drive?

As above, much more info needed.

 

[Santiago Andrea]

¿Cómo llegan los datos a la unidad de 1 TB?

Como arriba, se necesita mucha más información.

I just want the reading disk to transfer the writes to another disk, like a cache, similar to Raid1 or something similar, I think it's called writeback cache, but there isn't much information

 

[USAFRet]

I just want the reading disk to transfer the writes to another disk, like a cache, similar to Raid1 or something similar, I think it's called writeback cache, but there isn't much information

It sounds like you want to use the smaller 128GB drive as a cache for the larger.

While this is maybe doable, it will be FAR FAR more hassle than what you perceive the benefits to be.

 

[USAFRet]

What are the 2 drives in question, and what data is on them?

 

[Santiago Andrea]

I just want the reading disk to transfer the writes to another disk, like a cache, similar to Raid1 or something similar, I think it's called writeback cache, but there isn't much information

disk A: Games (read only with Diskpart)
disk B: I want to make it cache, so that it records the temporary data of the games (not updates), it happens that some games throw read-only errors, others do not

 

[USAFRet]

I was asking the make/model of the drives.

 

[Moonstick2]

disk A: Games (read only with Diskpart)
disk B: I want to make it cache, so that it records the temporary data of the games (not updates), it happens that some games throw read-only errors, others do not

Okay, so what you're saying is that you want to store games on the 1TB drive as normal, but have the game do any non-persistent writes (i.e. not updates or save games) to the 120 GB drive. What you haven't said is why.

The majority of gaming disk I/O can be basically described as "loading levels". There's very little writing going on. On this thread somebody reports testing Starcraft 2, a 30 GB game, and it only wrote about 300 MB over half an hour's play.

I can think of only two reasons for wanting to do what you're asking. One is that the 1 TB is HDD and the 120 GB is SDD. An HDD will have a write speed of, what, somewhere in the 50 - 200 MB/s region? You're not going to see any advantage using the SSD for writes while gaming.

The other reason is that the 1 TB is SSD but you're worried about repeated writes shortening its life. I've a 1 TB NVMe that's 3.5 years old. All my games are on it so presumably all their writes too. I've also removed and reloaded games repeatedly over the years. It still runs perfectly fine. You'd be worrying about nothing.

 

[Santiago Andrea]

Okay, so what you're saying is that you want to store games on the 1TB drive as normal, but have the game do any non-persistent writes (i.e. not updates or save games) to the 120 GB drive. What you haven't said is why.

The majority of gaming disk I/O can be basically described as "loading levels". There's very little writing going on. On this thread somebody reports testing Starcraft 2, a 30 GB game, and it only wrote about 300 MB over half an hour's play.

I can think of only two reasons for wanting to do what you're asking. One is that the 1 TB is HDD and the 120 GB is SDD. An HDD will have a write speed of, what, somewhere in the 50 - 200 MB/s region? You're not going to see any advantage using the SSD for writes while gaming.

The other reason is that the 1 TB is SSD but you're worried about repeated writes shortening its life. I've a 1 TB NVMe that's 3.5 years old. All my games are on it so presumably all their writes too. I've also removed and reloaded games repeatedly over the years. It still runs perfectly fine. You'd be worrying about nothing.

Disk A: NVMe 1TB. (Corsair)
Disk B: 120GB SSD. (Adata)
Games, like LOL o CODMW3 or Bluestacks, being read-only, mark an error and exit or remain in a loop.
I want you to write those few data to the 120GB disk, so the games don't give errors

 

[Moonstick2]

Disk A: NVMe 1TB. (Corsair)
Disk B: 120GB SSD. (Adata)
Games, like LOL o CODMW3 or Bluestacks, being read-only, mark an error and exit or remain in a loop.
I want you to write those few data to the 120GB disk, so the games don't give errors

But why is Disk A read only?

When you said earlier "disk A: Games (read only with Diskpart)", it's unclear if you mean Diskpart has told you it's read-only (but you don't know why), or you used Diskpart to set it to read only.

Either way, the answer is to use Diskpart to remove the read-only attribute from Disk A.

 

[Santiago Andrea]

Pero ¿por qué el disco A es de sólo lectura?

Cuando dijiste anteriormente "disco A: Juegos (solo lectura con Diskpart)", no está claro si te refieres a que Diskpart te ha dicho que es de solo lectura (pero no sabes por qué), o si usaste Diskpart para configurarlo en solo lectura. .

De cualquier manera, la respuesta es usar Diskpart para eliminar el atributo de solo lectura del Disco A.

It is configured with diskpart, so that they do not modify or uninstall games

 

[rgd1101]

so let me get this straight, you want to run a game on disk A, but if the game write anything, it will write to disk B?

 

[Santiago Andrea]

Déjame aclarar esto: quieres ejecutar un juego en el disco A, pero si el juego escribe algo, ¿lo escribirá en el disco

Exactly, make the 120GB disk a cache or something similar

 

[rgd1101]

that not cache. and you need to recode the game and OS to do it that way.

 

[DSzymborski]

This is the second thread of this and the whole premise is flawed. Problems should be solved as simply and directly as possible. if the problem is users uninstalling software, then go into the Local Policy Group Editor. If that is the problem, of course; you haven't really described the problem directly, only asked for assistance in how to implement an extremely convoluted idea.

Start over. What's the *exact* problem you're trying to solve? When my car has a flat tire, I replace the tire, I don't design a complicated mechanism that allows my car to run with three wheels.

 

[USAFRet]

Exactly, make the 120GB disk a cache or something similar

The question we're all wondering is....Why?

What problem are you trying to solve?

 

[Moonstick2]

It is configured with diskpart, so that they do not modify or uninstall games

I don't know who "they" are supposed to be, or why you're so worried that they might modify your game, or why you believe they can/would uninstall them.

Write-back RAID cache doesn't do what you seem to think. It's about writing data temporarily to a small fast disk, that then gets written to the large slow disk.

You're asking for something where a program (the game in this case) asks the OS to read from and write to Disk A, but the OS diverts all the writes to Disk B while still reading from Disk A and the program doesn't know it. Except the program doesn't write this temporary data for fun, or it wouldn't be temporary at all. It writes it to read it back. So if the OS gets asked to write CoDtemp1.ast to Disk A and writes it to Disk B instead, when the game then asks for CoDtemp1.ast from Disk A how is the OS supposed to know it's on Disk B?

What you're asking for isn't possible in any kind of practical sense.

If your big worry is "they" somehow cause you to lose or corrupt your games, the practical thing to do is to clone or image your 1 TB drive so you can restore it if that happens. Although if you're worried about "them" because you're not supposed to have these games for some reason, a better solution is to get legitimate copies.

 

[Grobe]

Spoiler: deleted old text

This is theory doable. However you need some heavy founds in order to start to build your own custom made OS. And then you need to involve hardware manufacturers in order to create drivers (for gpu, mb, etc) and the game developers in order to actually support your OS.

Maybe you can made a new OS based on Linux kernel - this is probably way more doable than making a new OS from scratch. You need to re-write file handling and then put on a desktop environment, and voila you just made your own distro (way way oversimplified).

[edit]
forget the above, just me being uninformed. Actually - when I think about it, I think you can do this with current OS.

Have a look at this article - it is from 2014, and require Linux (written for Ubuntu 13), but should still be valid:

SSD Caching Using dm-cache Tutorial

Update - 2014 July

blog.kylemanna.com

 

[USAFRet]

Exactly, make the 120GB disk a cache or something similar

In addition, if this were possible, you'd be using the slow drive as a cache for the fast drive.
Opposite to the way a cache works, and very much counterproductive.

 

[SkyNetRising]

It is configured with diskpart, so that they do not modify or uninstall games

You could make something with same functionality using virtual disks.
Use 1TB drive to house virtual disk vhd file.
Mount it, copy all necessary data into this virtual disk.
When it is done, dismount it and make a copy.
Remount it and use virtual drive.

When you need to restore drive to original state,
dismount it, restore file from copy and
remount it again.

 

[Moonstick2]

Ah, so the OP's other thread explains more the 'why' - there's a "game server" computer (holding Disk A in this thread, called Z: in that thread) that's trying to share the installed games with other computers.

Not sure how legitimate that sounds.

 

[Santiago Andrea]

Ah, so the OP's other thread explains more the 'why' - there's a "game server" computer (holding Disk A in this thread, called Z: in that thread) that's trying to share the installed games with other computers.

Not sure how legitimate that sounds.

Yes, iscsi disk shared between 10 PCs, the iscsi disk is read-only, only some games give me errors like LOL CODMDW3 (they want to write a few MB to the iscsi), that's why I need a disk where the writes are directed.
If the iscsi is left as read and write, it is corrupted

 

[Ralston18]

The objective being to make 9 other disks think they are the player's disk so 10 people can play the same game instead of only one person?

 

[USAFRet]

Yes, iscsi disk shared between 10 PCs, the iscsi disk is read-only, only some games give me errors like LOL CODMDW3 (they want to write a few MB to the iscsi), that's why I need a disk where the writes are directed.
If the iscsi is left as read and write, it is corrupted

This is why more information upfront is a good thing.

Now we're talking about 10 different client systems and 1 "server", which is a WHOLE DiFFERENT THING than the text in the original question.

The games DO want to write some minimal data to the server. This is probably a required function.
But for some reason, this supposedly gets corrupted.

Find THAT problem, and fix THAT problem...the theoretical corruption.

Identify the problem before applying a solution.​

Look into the game server install.
Even to the point of a full reinstall.