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Looking to buy a new HDD for Steam, what do?


DexRain

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Chip level hardware support is exclusive to Intel Smart Response Technology.  Thus require an Intel Z68 or later motherboard.

 

For AMD based systems you would need to revert to a software or SSD cache drive option.  There are a few cache drive options that include the application and hardware required to achieve SSD caching.  A few that come to mind are SanDisk Ready Cache, OCZ Synapse and Crucial Adrenalin.

 

The SanDisk is an especially attractive option due to price, ease of installation and customer feedback.

 

Other options you might consider; hybrid drives (like Seagate), or even RAID0 two WD Black 1Tb drives.  

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First thought that came to my mind was one of the hybrid drives. From what I understand they try to intelligently cache things in the solid state portion so it may take a few times of playing a game for it to load into that portion. For multiplayer games that use the same maps repeatedly it sounds like a good idea. For single player games that load levels in a sequential order, it seems the cache logic wouldn't give you any advantage though. Anyone have any real world experience with these drives?

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Personally I game on my SSD and only load up games I am playing. I keep a backup of all the games I own on my NAS if I need to install them again. Hoarding is an illness, fight the impulse, make your system lean and mean :-)

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Yeah I have a pair of (nearly full) USB 3.0 3tb external drives for hoarding things (movies, TV shows, music etc =] )

 

I do have Minecraft and League of Legends on my SSD though

Edited by DexRain

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