PCIE M.2 - OS and games on same drive?

adrichardson81 · 3 Jun 2020 at 13:16

Hi everyone

So the advice ever since I got into pc tinkering in the late 90s has been to keep your OS and games on different drives.

Anyone know if this is still the case with pcie nvme drives? I can certainly see the logic with hdds and with sata SSDs, but does it still apply now the drive has 4 lanes rather than 1 lane?

mattyfez · 3 Jun 2020 at 15:13

It doesn't really matter, other than for keeping things more organized like have a game drive separate to your system drive.

adrichardson81 · 3 Jun 2020 at 15:27

Cool - that opens up some more options for me in that case. I've got a 512gb os drive now, so I could swap in a 1tb further down the line.

Joxeon · 3 Jun 2020 at 19:29

I have a 1tb NMVE with OS and games on the drive, If/when I fill that I will probably grab another 1TB SSD.

I think in the olden days when SSDs were hugely expensive it was the best option to have a small SSD for OS and a HDD for games but now with 1TB SSDs around 100 quid and the fact that game load times get a substantial boost from SSDs it just makes sense. That said you could still get a small SSD for OS and another SSD for games but if you go for an NVME and only have one full speed M.2 slot then it seems a waste not to go with atleast 500GB if not 1TB.

mattyfez · 3 Jun 2020 at 19:42

Yeh,

Ive just upgraded some drives to get rid of the remaining spinny drives, currently

Samsung 240 evo ssd for system and a couple of games (I'm not one who has loads of games installed at once). had this drive a while.

Samsumg QVO 1tb ssd for media/general dumping ground - replaced a wd640 black 7200 spin drive
Kingston 240 ssd music drive already owned - replaced an ancient 250gb spin drive
kingston 240 ssd back up of music -replaced an ancient 250gb spin drive

adrichardson81 · 3 Jun 2020 at 21:11

I went with a 970 Evo plus for the OS. It's 512gb as the performance is much better than the 256gb version. I've also got 2x 1tb pcie 3.0 nvme drives for games (I think Silicon Power and Team, but they're just cheap and cheerful Phison drives with a ddr cache).

Docs, photos and music are on a 2tb Crucial mx500 and I've got a 1tb mx500 for older/archived games.

It's a lot of storage, but games are hitting 100gb+, so they really hit storage pretty hard.

Joxeon · 3 Jun 2020 at 21:51

adrichardson81 said:
I went with a 970 Evo plus for the OS. It's 512gb as the performance is much better than the 256gb version.

For 40 quid more than the Evo you could have got a faster 1tb gen 4.

adrichardson81 · 3 Jun 2020 at 22:06

I've had it for a while - if I was buying now though, I'd definitely have gone for a 4.0.

I'm debating selling it and buying a 1tb 4.0 though