d3Xt3r, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

As others have mentioned, the sequential speeds in RAID 0/5 won’t really help you in gaming. What you might see at best is faster loading times, but that’s really about it.

One option which no one else has mentioned is using setting up tiered storage using bcachefs - where your SSD acts like a cache drive, which would contain frequently read aka “hot” data, and the rest of the data would be on your spinning disks. This way, you’d be making the most of your limited SSD space, whilst still taking advantage of the large storage provided by the spinning disks.

The advantage of bcachefs is that all your drives can be part of the same pool and it’ll all be transparent to your OS/programs, and all your data is striped like a RAID 10 array, so you can replace your drives in the future without any issues, or any major config changes. Like if you get a faster NVMe drive in the future, you can set that as your “hot” (promote) drive, your SSD as the foreground drive and your spinning disk pool as the background ones and your data will automagically migrate.

Have a quick read of the manual, you’ll see that it’s actually fairly easy to set up and operate: bcachefs.org/bcachefs-principles-of-operation.pdf

The main drawback right now (for you) is that it’s not yet part of the kernel. The good news is that it’s gonna be in the next kernel (6.7), so you can either wait for it, or use a third-party kernel with bcachefs already compiled in it (I believe linux-tkg is one of them).