How do you organise your storage these days?

[danlightbulb]

In the old days of hard drives I had the OS on one drive or partition, and all the apps/games on another.

When I built my pc originally in 2016 I bought a 240gb SSD. Obviously outgrew this pretty quick so I bought a 1Tb SSD to go with it. Currently have OS on the original drive which is half full and all the games on the 1tb drive which is now nearly full.

Since then, m2's have become common. Then with a big capacity M2 you go back to having it all on one drive.

I have a spare 500gb SSD sitting unused at the moment. So I could plug this in the pc for extra storage. But then I'd have to mess around moving some apps to the drive and keeping some on the bigger drive. Or I could get a 2tb M2 and shift everything to that, but that will fill up too in not too long of a timeframe.

So how is the best way to organise storage these days?

 

[danlightbulb]

I have replaced all mine with 5 x m2 drives

Don't you still have to figure out where you want to put stuff though, in this set up. Whether M2 or SSD, you still have an OS drive (two in your case), plus presumably dedicated drives for other functions.

All my 2.5 ssds I throw into windows storage spaces
Can use different sizes,manufacturers, sata,m2,etc

Id not heard of this, thanks, sounds interesting, could be good solution for game drives, adding more drives just add to pool and steam sees it as one drive.



Also backups of everything, in my case would require an extra 1.5Gb local storage, plus whatever back ups I decide for the 2Tb home NAS. My backup strategy is currently poor. It would become quite costly though, and every time you need more drive space, you also need more back up space. Very quickly Im into a mountain of drives attached to either PC or network. Doesn't sound efficient - what would you do if you had to build a new PC from scratch today, in terms of your storage? How would you minimise complexity and maximise storage and back up capability?

 

[danlightbulb]

main NVME for windows and programs only
1 NVME for games that benefit from uber fast storage.
1 SSD for games that dont require such uber speeds, downloads etc.

So in my case I only have 1 M2 slot. So that itself brings a dilemma, because ideally you'd have the OS on it and segregate your games, but its waste of the slot to only go for an OS drive in terms of size - OS drive only really needs 250Gb for me. So it feels like a waste of capacity, but having say a 2Tb m2 in there for games means if I want to segregate OS, its on a slower SSD.

It seems like this Windows storage spaces is solving this problem, maybe. Pooling all your storage sounds like a good idea with regard to having to manage multiple drives, but how does it manage the OS, is it still advisable to segregate that? If so, and the OS is better on m2, then Im still in the space of having a wasted m2 slot with a small capacity drive.

 

[danlightbulb]

You're building a new pc from scratch, within reason a large budget. You need an OS, obviously, and space for big games, a few apps, some local hobby work eg video editing, photo editing or dev work, whatever floats your boat.

How do you configure your storage?