Is it still worth having a separate game drive with how fast nvme is?

GregI said:
I'm from a time when it was heavily advised to have your games on a separate hard drive from your Windows install. We're talking XP era.

With things like DirectStorage approaching and the ridiculous speed of these nvme 4.0 drives, do you think it's still needed for optimal performance?

Say a 500GB Windows nvme and another 2TB nvme for game installs being my idea.
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I still have a separate SSD for games. Not for speed, but for the ability to transfer the library to another PC if my OS disc fails. All my games are in Steam, and Steam is great at sorting out messes. You can just move the entire drive to another PC, click on stuff, and it sorts itself out. Wonderful! Fantastic if you have a failure or want to change your OS.. or move to a new PC.
 
My motherboards have so few M.2/NVME slots I wouldn't want to waste one just having a small drive for Windows, I have games installed on system drive these days.

As for installing Windows honestly I do it so rarely these days it's not much of a consideration. 20 years ago sure you'd end up installing Windows every 6-12 months due to stuff getting corrupted, new versions of windows coming out very frequently etc but honestly can't remember the last time I did a clean install, I think it was when Windows11 came out. Certainly my Win10 install was just an upgrade of 8.1 which was an upgrade of 8 iirc.
 
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Ive had a seperate ssd for games for a number of years but recently upgraded ny system and threw in a 2tb WD nvme drive as part of the upgrade. The nvme combined with gigabit internet, i can see no reason for a seperate drive anymore.

Worst case, nvme fails, my game config files are backed upto one drive and redownload all games in under an hour
 
I run my OS on a super fast NVMe drive (500GB). And have my data/games on 6 different SSD's. Means I only need to recover a "relatively" small amount of data if one drive fails. This and that after building so many PC's over the years, I've ended up with several spare SSD's (which are never really worth selling).
 
breadturbo said:
I still do it because I'm old fashioned and like to wipe windows without losing my steam and other game installs from time to time.
500gb 980pro m.2 as win11 drive and a 2tb m.2 as you said for the games, everything else is stored on my nas.
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This. Don’t have to re-download steam library and I can leave all my modding stuff in place and easily get it working again.

But yeah it comes from a time when you didn’t want windows IOPS interfering with your gaming disk activity so serves no real purpose anymore except keeping things physically separate. Ahh the days of quantum fireballs and their ilk!

Windows refresh makes things less painful as well these days.
 
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One big fast asf nvme with the biggest heat sink you've ever seen :cry: :D
The rig this is in, is only used for gaming, so no big deal to leave it on overnight to re-download games IF I ever needed to.
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until not too long ago i had games on a HDD... apart from a few that did benefit from faster drive speeds.

i had a 1tb nvme and a 2tb HDD.
now i just have 2 x 2tb nvme as they was cheap as hell... prices are on the up again.
 
mickyflinn said:
Personally like games on a seperate drive so you don't have to download again if doing a fresh install of Windows.

What case did you get in the end ?
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i do this too


Ace Modder said:
why not just make two partitions?
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If you change handwear a lot or mess about and screw things up you dont have to spend 3 days downloading games. it just an hour to set windows up and your off
 
I just stick with 1 large NVMe these days, it’ll be interesting to see if DirectStorage in the future makes it more beneficial to go back to using separate drives
 
One thing I would say, though the difference is slight - but not always insignificant, some NVMEs can be faster for different tasks and not always the same one will be strong at both OS booting/general OS access patterns and game loading.
 
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