I currently have a 1 TiB NVMe drive that has been hovering at 100 GiB left for the past couple months. I’ve kept it down by deleting a game every couple weeks, but I would like to play something sometime, and I’m running out of games to delete if I need more space.
That’s why I’ve been thinking about upgrading to a 2 TiB drive, but I just saw an interesting forum thread about LVM cache. The promise of having the storage capacity of an HDD with (usually) the speed of an SSD seems very appealing, but is it actually as good as it seems to be?
And if it is possible, which software should be used? LVM cache seems like a decent option, but I’ve seen people say it’s slow. bcache is also sometimes mentioned, but apparently that one can be unreliable at times.
Beyond that, what method should be used? The Arch Wiki page for bcache mentions several options. Some only seem to cache writes, while some aim to keep the HDD idle as long as possible.
Also, does anyone run a setup like this themselves?
Any reason why you can’t buy a 2TB SSD and have both a 1TB and 2TB? I have another comment on this thread outlining the complexities of caching on Linux.
I don’t have an available slot for another NVMe, and I wanted to avoid SATA because the prices are too similar despite the performance difference.
Do you have any spare pcie slots, you can get m.2 pcie cards