1 Large M2 NVMe or a 2 smaller drives?

Typhoon

Typhoon

Typhoon

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Going to be starting a new build for my dad based on a Ryzen 7 3700x and MSI B450 PRO VHD Max.
Is their any difference specifying a single 1TB Samsung 970 Evo M2 NVMe compared to a 970 Evo 250Gb NVMe Boot drive and separate 860 Evo 1Tb 2.5" SSD for storage?

Probably will not use more than 500GB of storage in the life time of the PC so drives are unlikely to approach capacity.

So basically 1 big drive or separate boot and storage drives? Is either option like to cause less slow downs in the future? Difference in cost not an issue.

Thanks
 
Thanks guys. Backup are not a problem. He saves everything to OneDrive as well as an external hard drive. So performance wise no difference?

Is a boot drive more likely to fail than a storage drive? If not, the risk of loosing your data is the same regardless of if you have one drive or seperate boot and storage drives. And the risk of any sort of failure/ disruption is double if you have 2 drives rather than one.
 
I don't like external USB 3 drives much, they're (desperately) slow - especially transferring lots of small files. Put your secondary drive internal if you can.
 
Typhoon said:
So basically 1 big drive or separate boot and storage drives? Is either option like to cause less slow downs in the future?
Click to expand...
Compared to mechanical drives SSDs don't suffer really at all from seek penalties of multiple simultaneous accesses.
And especially NVMes even have bandwidth to divide for multiple simultaneous accesses.
So even heavy in normal use simultaneous reads and writes have no need for separate source and target drives.

Samsung just brand overprices everything.
You'll get 1TB NVMe drive for £140.
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/teamgroup-mp34-1tb-nvme-pcie-m.2-solid-state-drive-hd-00b-tg.html
 
Typhoon said:
Is a boot drive more likely to fail than a storage drive? If not, the risk of loosing your data is the same regardless of if you have one drive or seperate boot and storage drives. And the risk of any sort of failure/ disruption is double if you have 2 drives rather than one.
Click to expand...
Random failures can't really be quantified in absolute numbers...
Except that with two drives there's doubled chance for suffering one random failure in same amount of time.

But what would certainly kill any SSD eventually is wearing down of Flash cells.
Every write (+erase) wears cell little and they're good only for certain amount of writes.
Think of it like some stone tablet which gets eventually "grinded" through...

Of course also capacity of the drive affects to what total amount of data written wears cells down.
So any software doing some data logging, or caching of data/settings on background (like web browsers do) will consume write cycles of small drive at faster rate than big drive.
And especially if drive starts filling up and empty space becomes small, write amplification kicks up and starts eating write cycles at even faster pace.
(also wear leveling is easier the more there's empty space)

So from perspective of Flash cell wear, single big drive is better than two smaller ones.


SSD drives actually have specification for total amount of writes they're expected to last and what's covered by warranty.
Beside no doubt testing they calculate it based on endurance of used NAND chips and write amplification and other controller related factors.
And for their luxury prices Samsung doesn't guarantee much!
970 Evo Plus has only basic amount of writes covered under warranty.
If you read the small print, warranty of it is either five years or 150TB for 250GB drive, 300TB for 500GB and 600TB for 1TB drive.
Phison E12 controller based drives are usually rated for quite lot more.
Like warranty of that TeamGroup MP34 covering 380TB for 256GB, 800TB for 512GB one and 1660TB for 1TB drive.
 
If got 2 pci~e x4 M2 slots available
And likely to copy to/from the drives
Often
Then that's when x4 M2 drives
Show a clean pair of heels
To 2.5 ssds
Some of my file transfers
Are finished before the window
Even opens
Using 2 x 960gb mp510
Other than that usage its hard to
Notice difference between a
X4 M2 and a 2.5 sata ssd
For everyday use
 
I bought just one this time round. Likely enough for what I use the machine for.

OS and games all bundled on to one drive.

Things have moved on tbh. Sure if I have a failure I gotta reinstall everything. But that's just an overnight download of games.

I should have probably partitioned the drive however. But never mind, that can be the next time round... When ever that is.
 
I've got an ancient 240GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD drive which has been up (online/running) for 6.7 years in total. It was my 'download' drive and had a lot of use with constant read/writes. It has just now flagged 1 (one) retired block but it's probably still good for a while yet.
 
Typhoon said:
Is a boot drive more likely to fail than a storage drive? If not, the risk of loosing your data is the same regardless of if you have one drive or seperate boot and storage drives. And the risk of any sort of failure/ disruption is double if you have 2 drives rather than one.
Click to expand...
having both drives fails at the same time is more unlikely than having any given one fail.

i would recommend 2 drives for the sake of better management of space on the partition. Having a system drive that is big enough to hold all your OS and programmes at around 50% of the capacity and then second drive to whatever size you need it to be. Bigger the better as that drive is likely to have more data writes to it so big drives have higher endurance.
 
imo you're more likely to lose data due to file corruption or virus attack than to hardware failure, but either way you have solid backups, right?
 
Right now I have a barracuda 510 500GB as system drive and a MP510 as my scratch disk for my photo and video edits as well as downloads. My static install files and OS are all on the barracuda. While the MP510 is the one getting writes and deletes etc.

also got a 1TB SSD for immediate storage and 6TB HDD for long term storage. Separate SSD for backup of OS and HDD for long term storage.

I am just very nervous about putting all my data (OS, Programs, storage) into one drive. Single failure result in massive amount of down time. This way is OS falls down I got SSD to plug in. And if my scratch disk or 1TB SSD down I am not that fussed. And the 6TB is on a redundancy also. Fingers crossed I am just being completely paranoid.

dont have offsite backup or cloud backups tho. I think for home use that’s taking it to the next level.

I started this primarily to defend against ransomware and had a NAS doing monthly full system backup and incremental weekly backup. Eventually decided to have singular OS disk backup is ok and cheaper as it is more or less static.
 
I have two NVMe drives, one dedicated to OS - but it is 1TB so something of a waste of space and really I should partition it. The second is 2TB and used for data I need to access fast. I use Macrium for disk image backups, those are stored on various HDs and a NAS, with the most recent backup also on the 2TB NVMe. I have another NAS which is a mirror of the first. If the OS drive dies I can get it back up in a minute or so by restoring the image, or a bit longer if I have to go to the slower media for an earlier version.

The 1TB OS drive was maybe a mistake and a smaller capacity would have made more sense, but I ordered it with my new PC and it seemed like a good idea at the time :-) The second 2TB NVMe I added shortly after when it came up for sale on MM. I've had dozens of mechanical HDs fail over the years, so much so I treat them as consumables like printer ink. Maybe I've been lucky but I have not had an SSD die on me yet. I keep an old (retired but functional) SSD offline with a copy of the OS drive but that can be a month out of date, maybe useful if everything else fails!

Anyway, yes - I prefer to have the OS on a separate drive just for simplicity. I'm not happy keeping data on the same physical drive.
 
pc-guy said:
i would recommend 2 drives for the sake of better management of space on the partition. Having a system drive that is big enough to hold all your OS and programmes at around 50% of the capacity and then second drive to whatever size you need it to be. Bigger the better as that drive is likely to have more data writes to it so big drives have higher endurance.
Click to expand...
Actually it's that system drive which gets written some amount pretty much always when PC is powered.
For example Windows keeps logs. (+ possible page file)
Also running programs can keep their own logs and for example web browser can keep backupping data for state of tabs etc of the session and normal cache.
https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here-is-how-to-fix-it/


ChrisLX200 said:
I'm not happy keeping data on the same physical drive.
Click to expand...
Some malware can wreck all data visible for OS anyway no matter on how many drives its stored in.
And unlike HDDs SSDs don't suffer from major performance penalty of trying to use drive for multiple simultaneous things.
 
EsaT said:
Actually it's that system drive which gets written some amount pretty much always when PC is powered.
For example Windows keeps logs. (+ possible page file)
Click to expand...

I don’t have page files setup since going to SSD and alway made sure I got enough provision for RAM.

compare with the data files I create on edits, the total Bytes written to my scratch disk is way higher. I have just setup my system but I was running 1TB disk and partitioned it had 17TB writes but my C partition had been fairly static overall. So most of it is from temp files generated from premier and downloads.

but with 2 drives I can monitor the usage more as well.
 
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