Going to say a bad word here for an example… In Lost Ark my M.2 would load me in and I would be almost out of sight before other people finished loading in. Also Direct storage is in the some games already and in the beta files for D4…meaning it’s coming soon to D4.
Plus if you need more than 4x 2TB drives you might have other issues.
Like I mentioned above:
I never argued against buying an M.2
I am just pointing out that a 990 or 980 is a waste of money at least for the average gamer.
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My Old PC had a 970 plus and 980 Pro. When I made this new one I moved those over and I added another 980 Pro and a 990 Pro. In all have 6TB of M.2 storage and very worth it.
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No, it does not. It just works the best with NVMe SSD.
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M.2 …
I love, love, love mine.
Same experience as raffaele, no issue using HDD (even with the slower loading, at times hints on the loading screens weren’t displayed long enough to be completely read).
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The major downside of using HDD is the stutter you will experience when assets are required to be loaded on the fly.
Most of my systems now use 3 tiers of drives.
The main drive is always an NVME style for pure speed.
Then my second drive either another NVME (If I have the slot), or a SATA based SSD.
Then if I need large space, I will use a SATA HDD that’s huge, like 4TB. Cost for GB is cheaper at that point.
My latest build is going to get 3 more NVMEs that I can RAID stripe, so that should be interesting. That will then be my game drive when I go that route.
Faster drives = faster load times.
Most of the active resources in the game are going to be loaded into memory while you’re running around the game unless you don’t have enough memory to do so.
If you don’t have enough memory and things get loaded into swap, on a spinny disk you’re gonna have a real bad time.
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It’s clear that both the OS & the swapfile have to be located on an SSD nowadays (having the game on an SSD but the OS / the swap on an HDD would be a terrible mistake in term of fluid experience).
I don’t know… Back when D3 first came out, I actually ran the game off of a high speed USB 3.0 memory stick. It was faster than a HDD, and it worked fine. But I didn’t do that long. lol
It was mostly for funzies. I later moved to a SATA based SSD. But all this was before NVME.
Apparently i’m doing it wrong, because i’m about to get 3 990 Pro NVMe and still have space for another 3 if I want to upgrade for a total of 12TB NVMe… I guess I should just buy a SATA SSD instead right??
I could even just put a couple of 8TB NVMe in the PCIe 5.0 expansion with my 3x 990s for 22TB of storage and have a spare m.2 slot, but pointless right?
At that point you need to think, do you really need the space? lol
Why? NVME is so much faster, why bother if you have that many NVME slots?
I know right, that’s why i’m just going with the 3 of them for now 
i’m sure in 5 years games will start taking up 1-2TB of space and i’ll need to add some more lol
It was in response to this:
My board supports 4 NVME, I plan to pick up 3x 2TB drives (and no, I don’t buy Samsung due to prices) and will stripe them as a RAID 0. 6TB drive that will probably be faster than the Kingston Fury in slot 1.
Well, the 980/990 are models, they have several difference sizes. But I will tell you something.
- The Kingston I bought was faster read/write and cost less. 7000/6000.
Actually been very happy with it. Samsung is like the high priced version of stuff.
The 2TB (or possibly 4TB) SSDs I plan to get will probably be made by either Silicone Power or whomever’s price puts them in a favorable spot. And I will probably keep the cost cut nearly in half for the same space. And not give up much for it either.
I got a Western Digital 500 Gig Sata SSD and it’s the best thing I ever did. That was for D2R and it helps immensely on everything else as well
Just to expand on your shopping choices:
Option one: Silicon Power 4TB NVME with ~5000 Read/4500 Write speeds. Not bad if using for storage. Price is $188 each on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BYN8NHXS/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?smid=A25SITGFW0OQJA&psc=1
Option two: Silicon Power 4TB NVME with Heatsink and ~7200 Read/6800 Write speeds. Better performance, bit higher at $244 each.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C4F9DSJ1/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A25SITGFW0OQJA&psc=1
From there you hit $250 for WD’s black drive of the same speed as the last, and a few others that keep getting higher. lol
Some were over $300.
I have been using SP drives for years, decent warranty, but out of over 100 I have sold, had 2 fail? So… Honestly, not bad.
online games i always put on SSD. single player games i put on the HDD
Reliability and temperature is a thing, though. A drive with no moving parts is an asset for more than just speed.