Octane V with Intel Optane 32gb and ssd question

[paulturner-hill146]

Hi Guys,

As there are some deals to be had on ssd's I'm wondering if having a 500gb m.2 nvme ssd as my steam and games location only would work.

I currently have a 7200rpm hdd with a Intel Optane 32gb as my boot drive and boots up really quick as it is so have no plans on changing that.

Question is would I get any benefit from having a second drive dedicated for steam and my games as a m.2 ssd has even faster read/write speeds than my Optane.

Thanks for any info that can be given.

 

[Oussebon]

What would make the most sense tbh would be to get the SSD and put Windows, programs, and games on it.

If you're going to have 1 thing on the SSD, it should be the OS.

 

[paulturner-hill146]

What would make the most sense tbh would be to get the SSD and put Windows, programs, and games on it.

If you're going to have 1 thing on the SSD, it should be the OS.

I understand that having the ssd as a boot and games drive as primary but what would the point of having
my hdd with Intel optane 32gb as a second drive? I don't even think Intel Optane supports caching a second drive.

I just want to know if I'd get better load times with steam and my games on ssd as a secondary drive as I mainly use my pc for gaming and browsing.

Having my os and games on 500gb of space does not sound appealing to me and a 1tb ssd is out of my budget range too.

 

[Oussebon]

Apparently it does: http://www.legitreviews.com/intel-optane-memory-tested-with-secondary-hard-drive_205254

Many in the PC community wanted to accelerate hard disk drives that weren’t the boot drive and let Intel know that if Optane could be used to cache mechanical hard drives that they would sell more Optane Memory sticks. The chip giant has listened to customer feedback and is allowing Optane software to cache data from any single SATA hard drive in a system, regardless of it being a primary/boot or secondary volume!

Note article for benchmarks.

It's bananas not to put the OS on the SSD. You want faster game loading times, but don't you want the rest of your system (including the OS, which runs everything including the game) to do things faster as well..?

Also you can transfer games between drives very easily and pretty quickly, so have your slightly-less-current games on the HDD and just migrate them around with Steam / whatever client your games use. I assume that will be even faster thanks to the Optane cache apparently working with secondary drives.

 

[paulturner-hill146]

Ah, I didn't know Optane now works on second drives. I'll have to look into this as now I won't feel that my Optane would be useless if I have ssd as primary.

Thanks