Partition or dedicated drive

Soldato
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6 Sep 2016
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I might be building a PC for someone. Is it best to have a dedicated drive solely for OS, with another drive for games. Or a single NVME, and either partition a ??GB partition for Windows and the rest for games. Or just have one partition for games and windows.

I'm thinking to save money create a smallish partition on a 2TB/4TB NVME for Windows, what size would you recommend? Then if he/I ever need to do a fresh OS install it'll leave his >3.5TB partition alone.


Personally I like having a dedicated drive, but I usually have enough spare drives, ie I used a 64GB SSD for a while even with Windows 10 as it's small enough not to start to get lazy with cluttering it up etc, and secondary drives for data.

What do you do?
 
Not partitioned for years
Drives are currently cheap though there's talk
They will slow production again to raise prices
I always prefer more than 1 drive
How you use them can vary
Windows on c games on d
Both on c and store image backups on d
Both on c and a backups clone on d
Or however you prefer
Not sure there's a right way and a wrong way
I just don't like relying on 1 drive
If the drive fails mechanically/physically you have no fallback plan
 
Similar to the comments above and what you have said you used to do.

I used to dedicate primary disk/ssd/nvme drive for Windows OS only. Would hold my games/apps/docs on another drive. Was useful as I used to do a regular re-install of Windows to keep things nice and clean. So would disable the other drives in BIOS or unplug/remove them until Windows was back up and then just continue on.

Nowadays I just have my primary NVMe with a single partition. But I still do keep a separate Seagate SHDD as a backup drive just incase.
 
I just have everything on a 1TB NVMe drive but haven’t partitioned it.

This was the done thing with HDD’s back in the day as there were certain advantages but not really necessary now.
 
Yeah I don't bother with partitions..
I have a 1tb 'sys' drive and a 2tb 'games and media' drive, but some times i will install games on my sys drive if my media drive is looking a bit full and i dont fancy uninstalling anything...

Only real advantage is if you need to reinstall windows, you dont have to re-download a shed load of games too....

So maybe do that... a 1tb sys drive and a second 2 or 4tb or whatever is suitable for games/movies/whatever. I suppose in this scenario a 1tb sys drive is overkill, but it does mean I've always got plenty of breathing space to move things around if i want.
 
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Another person who has abandoned multiple user partitions on a single drive years ago.

I used to created an OS and data partition on the same main drive years ago and then configure user profiles to point to the data drive partition but had an issue with an update of Windows years ago so gave up doing this, keep it nice and simple these days
 
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