Question Need drive config advice on new build

[Caveman]

Building a flight sim rig (7800x3d, 4090, 64 GB RAM)... Picked up the following drive for max performance:

SK hynix Platinum P41 2TB PCIe NVMe Gen4 M.2 2280 Internal SSD l Up to 7,000MB/S l Compact M.2 SSD Form Factor SK hynix SSD - Internal Solid State Drive with 176-Layer NAND Flash

Realized that total drive space is a higher priority now and got a 4TB WD SN850X, which is obviously no slouch but not as fast as the Platinum P41.

So... wondering if there's a best way to use both in the same rig, though 6 TB seems like a ridiculously large amount of space. I will more than likely just sell the Platinum P41 but wanted to get peoples opinions of what to do. Is there anyway I could stitch the 2 drives together and bios the OS towards the P41 for max speed but still get 6 TB of contiguous drive space.

Thoughts?

 

[igor_kavinski]

Install the OS on the SN850X and then use PrimoCache to set up the P41 as a fast cache for faster reads/writes.

PrimoCache - Excellent Software Caching Solution to Accelerate Storage

Home page of PrimoCache product which is a supplementary software caching scheme to improve the system performance.

www.romexsoftware.com

You could use 1 TB of the P41 for caching purposes and create a drive for storage with the rest of the free space.

 

[Tech Junky]

FS might be more drive intensive but most games only need the speed to do the initial loading of things.afyer that it's run out of the GPU.

After the initial load my drives are mostly idle. If you want to monitor it there's usually an overlay option with windows + g and it gives you some stats while in the game. For storage space a spinner is where the economical space is. You can get an 18tb for around $200 for bulk storage. If you want a combo of storage and space then look into raid or even a SATA SSD should perform well enough at a slightly lower price than an nvme.

 

[Caveman]

Thanks for ideas. I'll be installing FS2020, IL-2, DCS, and XP12. All those with extra planes, etc... takes up about 1.8TB and I didn't want to have to "sweat it"... It sounds like Primo Cache creates a "slow, bulk RAM" sort of situation? One can imagine the value there...

 

[igor_kavinski]

All those with extra planes, etc... takes up about 1.8TB

You could try turning on NTFS compression. It may be slightly faster because fewer data needs to be read from disk and since it would be mostly read-only data, there won't be any compression overhead. Your CPU would be decompressing data in memory most of the time.

If you have ample CPU power available, you can pack the data even more tightly with LZX: https://theitbros.com/lzx-new-windows-10-ntfs-compression-algorithm/