SSD's & other storage workingn together

Lee Monk · 4 Jun 2020 at 18:10

Hi,

I'm looking for some advice on how to setup my storage moving forward.

On my current PC I purchased a small SSD a while back. This was in addition to a couple of 500gig/1TB mech drives.

The issue I had was that the SSD was small and filled up with all sorts of crap quite quickly. So I ended up creating, when required, a (program files x86 (something like that)) on my spare drives and started spreading new installations across the drives. A similar thing happened for my Steam games. Half the installation or saved games were on my OS drive whereas the game itself was on onother.

However I understand that doing this is not ideal.

As I start to move to A) build a new system and B) Tidy up my current one for my son (with a fresh W10 install) how should I set up my drives?

Am I better off buying a PCI SSD for the operating system at 250g and a 1TB SSD for storage/games or just buy two 1TB SSD's? (working on the premise that a PCI SSD for the OS will be fast).

Assuming that I split the drives how do I manage the storage of games when they want to create program(86) files and when steam wants to put certain things on my OS drive?

*edit*

Is it worth a PCI SSD for an OS? I use my machine almost entirely for gaming and browsing and the very occasional excel file.

Any advice or questions (probably because I explained this really badly) are welcome.

lee

Alex h · 4 Jun 2020 at 20:40

Hi I've gone 1 tb drive for operating system and my main apps games are on another drive are you going to use all ssd or are you going mechanical drives for storage if the latter get the biggest you can afford you'll soon use the space especially with latest games I'd also keep the 500 mechanical for backup your main files mate

Lee Monk · 4 Jun 2020 at 21:35

I've got a combination of things that I can use.

I certainly plan on buying a new 1TB SSD for the new machine however Iv'e only recently discovered the PCI ones and they seem appealing given the speed and cost purely for an OS drive.

However my concern is how I split data between games, program files 86 and saved games.

It may be more of a 'software' question than a storage question.

Alex h · 4 Jun 2020 at 21:38

That I don't know mate I just put steam on another drive like you and let it get on with it never had a problem doing this the only thing that shows up on my game drive is steam nothing else

megatron · 6 Jun 2020 at 03:48

Have u got an NVME M.2 slot (PCI-e)? If you have X570 or B550 you can use M2 gen 4x4 NVME drives (intel 490 boards should have gen 4 compatibility with the next intel CPU after 10 series, the board itself with an updated CPU).

Personally I have a 250GB SATA SSD for boot, a 1TB 860 Sata SSD for games + . I have 2 M.2 slots but I know Samsung have announced a 980 pro gen 4 NVME SSD which has 6500MB/s read, which beats the current gen 4 crop with Phison E16 controller (5000MB/s read, 4400MB/s write). So I want to wait for round 2 gen 4 NVMEs.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...wkR8Cg3kLE9CBoVzQksO9fU5NijfZX5EAY_5i/pubhtml
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B27_j9NDPU3cNlj2HKcrfpJKHkOf-Oi1DbuuQva2gT4/edit#gid=0
https://extremehw.net/forum/compone...0-guide-on-choosing-storage-for-your-hardware

These gen 4 NVME with a faster controller than the E16 have all be delayed I suspect by human malware.