Comment by ryao
5 days ago
To give an answer that nobody else has given, ZFS is great for storing Steam games. Set recordsize=1M and compression=zstd and you can often store about 33% more games in the same space.
A friend uses ZFS to store his Steam games on a couple of hard drives. He gave ZFS a SSD to use as L2ARC. ZFS automatically caches the games he likes to run on the SSD so that they load quickly. If he changes which games he likes to run, ZFS will automatically adapt to cache those on the SSD instead.
The compression and ARC will make games load much master than they would on NTFS even without having a separate drive for the ARC.
As I understand, L2ARC doesn't work across reboots which unfortunately makes it almost useless for systems that get rebooted regularly, like desktops.
L2ARC has had persistence support for a few years now.
Wow thanks for pointing that out, apparently it's been around for four years since with the first 2.0 release without me noticing.