Sharing an M2 drive for OS and Games

[Dirk Diggler]

I've got a 2TB M2 SSD and thinking of using it partitioned where 120GB is Windows and the rest is storage for games. Is this worth it, or am I going to lose too much access capacity on the drive with Windows using it at the same time as the games?

 

[Murphy]

Not sure what you mean by 'access' capacity but about the only advantage partition a drive has is making it a bit easier to do backups (drive images) and depending on personal preferences easier to organise. Assuming you're not dual booting or using different file systems that is.

If it were me I'd just let Windows partition the whole drive as it sees fit and store data wherever (My Documents maybe) and use the default location for installing any games.

e: If it is to make it easier to image the drive and restore to just the partition Windows is installed to then no, having Windows installed in one partition and storage/games on a separate partition on the same drive won't effect performance and the overall capacity loss is so small (maybe 1-2MB) that it's not worth worrying about.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

Not sure what you mean by 'access' capacity but about the only advantage partition a drive has is making it a bit easier to do backups (drive images) and depending on personal preferences easier to organise. Assuming you're not dual booting or using different file systems that is.

If it were me I'd just let Windows partition the whole drive as it sees fit and store data wherever (My Documents maybe) and use the default location for installing any games.

e: If it is to make it easier to image the drive and restore to just the partition Windows is installed to then no, having Windows installed in one partition and storage/games on a separate partition on the same drive won't effect performance and the overall capacity loss is so small (maybe 1-2MB) that it's not worth worrying about.

I'm doing a Windows/Ubuntu dual boot and it's managed by imaging the drive with Macrium, so no issues there.

What I'm asking, is whether having the operating system on the same physical drive will be a big negative for games loading etc. even if I have the games on their own partition. The alternative would be to have the OS on a dedicated disk and the games on a dedicated disk... But maybe the benefit of separate disks is negligible?

 

[Murphy]

It won't, no.

On HDD it matters a little bit because the head has to travel from the outside to inside of the platters but with SSDs they don't care where the data is stored.

 

[Tetras]

The alternative would be to have the OS on a dedicated disk and the games on a dedicated disk... But maybe the benefit of separate disks is negligible?

For the most part the performance impact is minimal, except if e.g. Windows is downloading a large update, but you'd need a hefty downpipe to saturate the bandwidth of a SSD. If you have two separate, you'd be 1. losing an M.2 slot (and most boards don't have many of them) and 2. getting an SSD that is measurably slower, since larger capacities usually have higher performance.

 

[Minstadave]

I'm doing a Windows/Ubuntu dual boot and it's managed by imaging the drive with Macrium, so no issues there.

What I'm asking, is whether having the operating system on the same physical drive will be a big negative for games loading etc. even if I have the games on their own partition. The alternative would be to have the OS on a dedicated disk and the games on a dedicated disk... But maybe the benefit of separate disks is negligible?

There's little to no gain having a separate OS and games drive these days. I wouldn't normally bother partitioning the drive either, the only real benefit is it makes it simple to backup the OS drive and ignore the games partitions.