One drive or two

[neo-omega]

Hi there,

It's been a while since I've looked at the storage on my PC. When I built my current PC (back in the Windows 7 days!) the common wisdom was to have one SSD for the OS and then a separate SSd for games storage. This was before NVME and M.2 SSD's. In the "near future" I'll be looking to upgrade the whole PC and move to M.2 storage.

My question is: Is there a benefit from having a separate M.2 SSD for games and a different M.2 SSD for the OS?

 

[Zefan]

I don't think there's any perceivable performance benefit now. The main benefit for me is logistical, in that I can wipe my windows disk, keeping my data/games drive without having to worry about partitions etc.

 

[t31os]

As above it's primarily a logistical thing, if you like that literal separation of data it's handy, but you can for the most part manage it via partitions. It's still handy having that isolation, whether it's necessary is mostly preference i think. I still do it old school, OS on a single drive, everything else isolated away from that drive, but that's mostly out of old habits than a necessity (convenient if the OS drive fails or needs replacing to). I might be a bit old or stuck in my ways, but it's always seemed effective to give the OS a drive to temp write/cache and do what it needs and separate away all else (it's probably less necessary now, but i still do it).

 

[OverDrive]

Even if you installed games on a separate drive/partition, wouldn’t wiping and re-installing Windows on the primary ‘break’ those installations due to loosing registry entries etc?

 

[Grimley]

Not if you install Steam on that separate drive. In my experience with that software, you launch the .exe file then it repairs itself by downloading the necessary files to do so. How long? depends on what your steam library contains & your internet speed.