You are reading a single comment by @CYOA and its replies. Click here to read the full conversation.
  • Don’t waste your time with SATA, definitely not with spinning rust.

    You don’t need expensive branded PCIe to M.2 risers. Check to see if your motherboard supports PCIe bifurcation (splitting a single physical x8/x16 slot into several x4). If so, grab a cheap Gen4 riser off AliX/Amazon/EBay/wherever and stick 2x 4TB drives in there. What’s your mobo model?

    I really wouldn’t skimp on the drives themselves though; I can’t beat this drum enough. Cheap consumer drives are a waste of time for your use case: tiny amounts (or none at all) of write cache, totally hobbling write speeds after the first few gigs. Terrible write endurance ratings meaning the drive will become toast much sooner. No power loss protection, so big chance of data corruption if your machine suddenly loses power.

    Prosumer/datacentre grade drives aren’t that much more expensive than consumer shite per TB.

  • This one:
    https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/B550-VISION-D-rev-10#kf

    Is that Corsair a cheap consumer drive? Doesn't feel like it at nearly a grand. But perhaps the 8TB premium inflates it.

    No power loss protection, so big chance of data corruption if your machine suddenly loses power.

    That's a concern - I've had a lot of crashes recently - whole computer shuts down and won't reboot unless I disconnect from power for 30 odd sec. Only happens playing PUBG. Haven't been able to diagnose. But certainly wouldn't want contents vanishing..

  • Sounds like you need a separate gaming PC...

  • From a cursory glance, it looks like your mobo does support PCIe bifurcation, so my suggestion to use a cheap passive bifurcation riser card to run 2x NVME drives from one of the PCIe slots will work.

    You’ll need to set the mobo to run each of the x16 slots at x8 (this won’t affect your GPU performance much), then enable ‘2x x4’ mode on the other slot to bifurcate it into 2.

    I use Samsung PM9A3 datacentre drives in our storage servers; good bang for buck (3.84TB for £400). Make sure you use U.2 formfactor drives instead of M.2 though: better performance and cooling.

About

Avatar for CYOA @CYOA started