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?
I was using this kind of a setup a long time ago with 120GB SSD and 1TB HDD. I’ve found the overall speedup pretty remarkable. It felt like a 1TB SSD most of the time. So, having a cache drive of around 10% of the main drive seems like a good size to cost compromise. Having a cache 50% size of the basic storage feels like a waste to me.