Ideal hard drive setup

Mylestheone · 19 Apr 2021 at 07:59

Pretty simple question but curious as to what people would do. I've got a 970 Evo Plus 2TB that I plan to use for OS + games on my new build. I also have a left over 250gb 860 Evo. What would be the best use for it? More programs? More Games? Video editing drive?

MrFunex · 19 Apr 2021 at 08:41

Is there much speed difference between the two?

Mylestheone · 19 Apr 2021 at 08:58

MrFunex said:
Is there much speed difference between the two?

real world might be different, but in terms of actual specs
970 Evo Plus M.2 NVME - 3,500/3,300 MB/s
860 Evo SATA 6 - 550/520 MB/s

mickyflinn · 19 Apr 2021 at 10:05

Use it for whatever arises does it need a specific use.

lsg1r · 19 Apr 2021 at 10:14

I use a second smaller ssd as a scratch disk for things like photoshop/video editting etc, but then I have more than 2 drives in my systems, with others allocated to storage and 'documents' so as to keep them separate when I do reinstalls etc.

MrFunex · 19 Apr 2021 at 11:09

Mylestheone said:
real world might be different, but in terms of actual specs
970 Evo Plus M.2 NVME - 3,500/3,300 MB/s
860 Evo SATA 6 - 550/520 MB/s

Wow! In that case, I'd just use it as a scratch disk, maybe as a drive to put some lesser-used games on, whatever really!

Mylestheone · 19 Apr 2021 at 11:26

lsg1r said:
I use a second smaller ssd as a scratch disk for things like photoshop/video editting etc, but then I have more than 2 drives in my systems, with others allocated to storage and 'documents' so as to keep them separate when I do reinstalls etc.

ahh! see I didn't think of using it as a scratch disk, that's what I'll do and maybe some games that I don't play too often. I do have some disk drives that I use for long term storage and media playback and plenty of externals too

pp111 · 19 Apr 2021 at 19:20

I use a 250 for OS and applications but keep a 2TB one for games. If your games are Steam then they will happily install even if your C: is destroyed without having to download them again. Its a real time saver if anything happens.

The_Arbiter · 19 Apr 2021 at 19:28

Depending on how much room your documents/photos take up, you could stick the drive in an enclosure to use as an external backup. They're cheap enough.

Or sell it.

Mylestheone · 19 Apr 2021 at 19:29

pp111 said:
I use a 250 for OS and applications but keep a 2TB one for games. If your games are Steam then they will happily install even if your C: is destroyed without having to download them again. Its a real time saver if anything happens.

True, I am at the limit on my current build with the OS on 250gb SSD though, plus I'd prefer the OS on the NVME drive

Mylestheone · 19 Apr 2021 at 19:31

The_Arbiter said:
Depending on how much room your documents/photos take up, you could stick the drive in an enclosure to use as an external backup. They're cheap enough.

Or sell it.

I already have 3 externals that total 18TB lol. I'll just use it as a scratch disk and other temp files here and there.

pp111 · 19 Apr 2021 at 23:34

Mylestheone said:
True, I am at the limit on my current build with the OS on 250gb SSD though, plus I'd prefer the OS on the NVME drive

*wonders why?*

My OS ( Windows 10 ) and apps take up 80GB. Everything else is on other drives. Well, two, I have one for Steam and one for general data.

Joxeon · 19 Apr 2021 at 23:38

Just use it to backup anything you wouldn’t want to lose should the main drive fail.

Cooler running · 20 Apr 2021 at 00:49

Not sure, there isn't a good option here. 250 GB is too small for a windows boot drive given how 3rd party software is obsessed with installing on C. That said, having a random 250 GB data dive seems superfolous next to a 2 TB boot drive.

I personally have a 480 GB boot and 512 GB data and wouldn't go lower than that on either.

240/256 is fine for a Linux system but not for Windows.

Rroff · 20 Apr 2021 at 00:57

MrFunex said:
Is there much speed difference between the two?

I have CP2077 installed on both a 970 EVO Plus and a Kingston HyperX 3K (similar speeds to the post in reply to you above) - the load time difference in game is barely anything

under 2 seconds in it on average probably.

Some applications are faster on NVME but ~500MB/s SSDs generally aren't that far behind outside of very specific applications.

Digit · 20 Apr 2021 at 09:50

People must put a lot of junk on their OS drive. I know some have said that certain retailers software comes with a lot of bloat, but it can't be that much, surely...

I run a 250GB Samsung 970 Evo NVME as my OS drive and still have over half of the space left. And that's after fully up to date Win 10, Photoshop, Lightroom and many other programs/software. The one thing I have always done is move my Temp files to always be written to a secondary HDD. So I have 250GB = OS, 2TB SSD = Steam/games, 3TB HDD = Storage/music etc, 500GB SSD = Scratch drive.

And what has been mentioned above about SSD/NVME speeds. Honestly there is no real difference between a 500MB/s SSD and 3500MB/s NVME. It's mainly just a sell scam. In real world situations such as gaming you wouldn't notice the difference. And some may argue that transfer speeds are much faster. No they're not. And let's face it, you don't want to be writing to an SSD all the time anyway.

Mylestheone · 22 Apr 2021 at 08:55

pp111 said:
*wonders why?*

My OS ( Windows 10 ) and apps take up 80GB. Everything else is on other drives. Well, two, I have one for Steam and one for general data.

My work projects take up a lot of data alongside bluestacks builds and VMs which perform a lot better on my SSD.

I'm just going to use it as a scratch disk.

pp111 · 22 Apr 2021 at 13:37

Mylestheone said:
My work projects take up a lot of data alongside bluestacks builds and VMs which perform a lot better on my SSD.

I'm just going to use it as a scratch disk.

All my drives are SSD. But having everything on different drives is really useful if there is a catastrophic failure.

adrichardson81 · 22 Apr 2021 at 16:18

pp111 said:
All my drives are SSD. But having everything on different drives is really useful if there is a catastrophic failure.

Yep - separate drives are safest, but as a minimum you should have the OS on its own partition.

As for the ssd in this case, I'd donate it to someone who needs to upgrade a laptop. It's really too small to be useful and it would be slower than your m.2 as a scratch drive.

pp111 · 23 Apr 2021 at 09:22

adrichardson81 said:
Yep - separate drives are safest, but as a minimum you should have the OS on its own partition.

As for the ssd in this case, I'd donate it to someone who needs to upgrade a laptop. It's really too small to be useful and it would be slower than your m.2 as a scratch drive.

I don't actually agree with using partitions. Maybe it's just me, but it's one more thing to fail. Every time I have used partitions, it's ended badly. I guess it's just my personal preference.