NVME upgrade advice

[Emjay86]

Hi folks,

I am hoping one of you could provide me with a bit of advice regarding NVME upgrade choice.

I Currently have everything on a combination of SATA SSD and HDD and I'm cautious over the fact that my boot SSD is about 10 years old now, so am a little worried about it dying soon.

My mobo has PCIE4 slots (ROG Crosshair VIII Hero) and the price of some of the NVMEs are quite decent. There's a deal on a crucial 1tb for £68 today for example.

As a habit, I always have my OS on a dedicated drive and it feels a little strange to buy a 240gb NVME when I can just buy a larger one. But in that same token, I can't quite convince myself that sharing a drive with my games/music and OS is fine.

So I guess the question is this: am I better off getting the larger NVME and enjoying the larger capacity and speed, or do I go with 1 1tb and 1 240gb for the OS and stay the course that I have been on for God knows how long now?

 

[AStaley]

If you have the money go with the larger capacity you might only use it for OS now but in the future you have the option to use it for something else, right now there is little difference in gaming between NMVe and SSD but in the future you will have DirectStorage and games may take advantage of that NVMe. And I'm sure you already know, but you have a 2nd NVMe slot on that board.

 

[Emjay86]

If you have the money go with the larger capacity you might only use it for OS now but in the future you have the option to use it for something else, right now there is little difference in gaming between NMVe and SSD but in the future you will have DirectStorage and games may take advantage of that NVMe. And I'm sure you already know, but you have a 2nd NVMe slot on that board.

Thanks for the response.

Yea I am aware there are two, which is why I was wondering if it's better to get two 1tb NVME or one 1tb and one 250gb for the OS.

I have plenty of space for my games and stuff tbh and it's a question of future proofing really I guess.

I throw most of my games that benefit from the SSD on them and the rest can go on my HDD.

 

[AStaley]

Go with the largest you can afford, I use my 1TB for OS/app (but have space for games should I need it) and the 2TB for games I regularly play, anything else goes on with my 4TB SSD or the 5TB USB HDD and can be transfered to either later on. Games installs are getting larger, better to have the space than the need to upgrade again later, albeit later there will be quicker drives.

 

[Quartz]

As a habit, I always have my OS on a dedicated drive

Good move.

ROG Crosshair VIII Hero

You have three M.2 slots. Have one for the OS and use the other v4 for general storage.

 

[EsaT]

No sense to waste limited M.2 slots for tiny drives.

Once booted, Windows consumes barely any storage bandwidth in SSD scale for its own uses.
And only time dedicated OS drive has ever helped performance is when you have insufficient memory and system is using page file frequently.
At which point priority should be more memory...

There's a deal on a crucial 1tb for £68 today for example.

Crucial P2 is QLC Flash drive and you need bigger drive just to keep performance.
If SLC cache isn't enough, QLC drives become slower in sustained sequential writes than HDD.

Heck, 500GB model is USB2 slow with 40 MB/s sustained write:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crucial-p2-m-2-nvme-ssd/3
1TB should double that with twice the internal parallelism.

That makes supposedly bad 400 MB/s of WD SN550 look good.

 

[Emjay86]

Thanks for all the feedback.

I'm thinking of possibly going for 2x 1tb NVMe's in that case.

What kind stats should I be looking for, considering i only use my PC for gaming?