Question Two WD Black 4TB HDs in RAID 0 or Intel Optane?

[omenrip]

Hi,

I have 2 new Western Digital Black 4TB HDs that I’m going to use strictly for playing games (Steam, etc.). My plan is to install a 32GB Intel Optane module that I happen to have lying around into my Z390 Aorus Master motherboard. The Optane would be used to speed up the access of the WD drives during games.

But then I thought of putting the 2 WDB’s in RAID 0 mode to get more performance out of them and to create a larger HD.

I run a backup each night of anything I must keep, but the original games can easily be reinstalled if something bad happens to either drive.

What does anyone think about RAID 0 vs Intel Optane? I heard that Intel will release a 118GB Optane module in the near future. Maybe this would be comparable to RAID 0 for game access? Or possibly sell the 2 WDB’s and get a 10TB NAS drive and use Optane? I’m just about ready to install these drives into my new build (9900K), so I want to do it right the first time.

Thanks for the comments.

 

[popatim]

You know Optane merely caches the most used files right?
It can't speed up the whole 4 or 8tb's, just the 32gb of data it decided to cache. A good chunk of that will be files Windows needs as well as your startup programs.

Raid0 will give you a nice large drive (8tb) and fast sequential reads & writes but the tradeoff is lowered random access causing your games loads to possibly be slightly slower. You may not even notice.

The choice is yours.

 

[omenrip]

Hi,

Thanks for replying.

I’m putting Windows on a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2 SSD, so I was only going to use Optane to cache the HD’s. I usually have 50-70 Steam games installed, playing the same game for a few nights in a row before switching to another one. As you said, Optane could only help with repeated access to the most recently used files. I’m not sure - with only a 32GB Optane - that I would notice much of a speed increase.

That leaves RAID 0. From your description, it seems like RAID 0 is the way to go for me, since I effectively double my drive size, while definitely increasing performance. All my games should load faster, regardless of when I last accessed them.

Thanks again.

 

[popatim]

Performance gain is only in large sequential access. Most games are mostly random. Most applications/game are not usually effect much unless they have large files to load.

 

[omenrip]

If I understand you correctly, i won’t see much, if any speed up with games on my RAID 0 WDB’s. I’m sure a 2-4 TB SSD would definitely show loading performance increases, but a good 4 TB SSD is way over what I spent on the 2 WDB’s.

What about something like a Seagate BarraCuda Pro Compute? Will that give me some speed up when loading games? Or will I only notice a difference with a SATA or PCIe SSD? I’m willing to sell the WDB’s if I can get something larger than 2TB (my old rig ran out of game room with a 2 TB HD) and that’s significantly faster.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks for the comments.