Disk optimisation?

Hi guys. Nothing serious, just wanted to know if there’s something I can do regarding optimising my hard drives? I have a good few hard drives with Bazzite installed, and I see some games take their time to load, or tend to stutter when loading things from the disk. Might just be a hardware issue or something, but I wanted to know if there’s anything I should keep in mind when it comes to this? Should I just get one big SSD instead of multiple different disks? I initially installed Bazzite on 2 HDDs and 2 SSDs. Any advice would be very helpful! Thanks!
12 Replies
Kyle Gospo
Kyle Gospo21h ago
in /etc/fstab increase zstd to 5 for HDDs the extra compression will help with both read and write speeds
Hugo H5
Hugo H5OP21h ago
That’s amazing. May I ask what exactly this means? What exactly “changes”? I’ll take a look once I’m home by the way! Thank you
Kyle Gospo
Kyle Gospo20h ago
That file contains a line for every partition that is automatically mounted on your system By default it uses zstd:1, or z standard with level 1 compression For slower drives increasing that will improve speeds Just make sure your syntax is valid, you can render your system unbootable by messing that file up
Hugo H5
Hugo H5OP20h ago
Noted. Makes sense Will take a look and confirm. Chances are that’ll fix it right up. Thanks again @Kyle Gospo Oh one more question. Is there a reason it uses zstd:1 by default? Is it a “safer” option, like with how CPUs don’t initially run their memory profile until it’s set up in BIOS? Or is there another reason?
Kyle Gospo
Kyle Gospo20h ago
1 is good for NVMEs detecting hard drive type is a bit of a crapshoot -- best to assume the best and simply not be as good on older/slower stuff
Hugo H5
Hugo H5OP20h ago
In that case, would it be better to stick to SSDs and remove hard drives entirely? From a hardware perspective of course I guess that much is obvious but I suppose it’s worth asking. I can’t say how big the difference will be between configuring hardware differently (only SSD) or changing the file to zstd:5
Kyle Gospo
Kyle Gospo20h ago
We recommend an SSD at the bare minimum for the OS for games, HDD is fine go nuts NVME is obviously preferred for the system some newer games have their own requirements on drive/drive speed ratchet and clank has an NVME as the minimum
Hugo H5
Hugo H5OP20h ago
Noted. I believe the OS should be on a 240GB SSD. This was what I originally used for Windows OS as well, before I made the switch. On that note, if I were to get an NVME and install it, what would be the procedure to mount it? Any specific format I need to use? I see there is a Disk program available to use on the OS, would that be the optimal way to do it? Would it be automatic?
Kyle Gospo
Kyle Gospo20h ago
Honestly if you're going to get an NVMe, I would immediately just install bazzite on that and get it off of the SSD
Hugo H5
Hugo H5OP20h ago
In that case, would there be a way to do it on the OS itself, or would I need to do it externally like I initially did? Via USB Flash Drive?
Kyle Gospo
Kyle Gospo20h ago
You would need to do it externally, even just to copy from one drive to the other
Hugo H5
Hugo H5OP12h ago
I’ll have to look up on how to do that effectively then. Thank you for the advice! Another question. If I install an NVME and move the OS onto it, do I still take the steps to change the file to “zstd:5” if the rest of my setup remains the same? (2 HDD, 2 SATA SSD?) Oh hold on. This was only specifically for the HDDs, not as a whole Update: I changed the values. Will see if it makes any difference in performance
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