I have an 8tb harddrive and 256gb sdd and I want to use them as a game drive on linux. I’m not sure what’s the best method for setting that up is or if it’s even a good idea.
I have an 8tb harddrive and 256gb sdd and I want to use them as a game drive on linux. I’m not sure what’s the best method for setting that up is or if it’s even a good idea.
Kind of true. The cheapest nvme drives can be that low. Quality drives are in the low thousands. They do wear leveling to maximize the life of the sectors. I’m reading that it would take roughly 600 times the drives capacity of writes before a sector reaching the limit on a quality drive. It’s still not the best choice for a cache drive, but enterprise grade nvme drives have significantly more cycles before failure. Unless there’s really heavy traffic, an nvme cache would last years before possible issues.
In OPs case, I’d just install the games on the SSD rather than cache them. Ideally, get a larger drive even if it’s used.
I have a 4tb microcenter nvme as my nvr drive. It’s wearing about 10% a year. I don’t think I’ll care in 6 years that it’s at 70% wearout. What’s the oldest component in your rig? Will it ever be your nvme?
I have 2 x 250GB Samsung 840 SSDs as cache drives in my unraid server. That’s been their job for about 5 years. Before that, they were in a RAID 0 on my main desktop for many years. I just looked at their attributes in Unraid and they’ve been online for 15y 7d for one of them and 15y 11m and their remaining wear level is 65% and 69% respectively. One of those drives may fill and clear 3+ times a day where other days it could be 25-50%, so I’d consider at least that one as heavy use. They other is mostly just app data and lower transfer volume.
Those are old tech drives that are small capacity and have a lot of transfers on them in my arr setup and manual process before that. To still have more than 50% life is a testament to how good the wear leveling is and how the write count isn’t all that important for 99% of applications.
There are even tools that will cache your most used steam games on the SSD, essentially achieving what OP wants