Storage upgrade advise.

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Morning peeps, merry Christmas and all that!

I was hoping to get some guidance on a storage upgrade solution.

Currently I have 1x 1TB HDD, 1x 500gb HDD, 1x 120gb SSD (boot drive) and 1x 500gb SSD.

I use my PC solely for gaming, and it's come to the point where I can't fit all my speed demanding games on my SSD's, meaning some of my games are just slow, due to being on HDDs, which are frankly old anyway (boot drive and 1tb HDD are about 10 years old!).

So I was originally thinking of making use of the M.2 slots on my ROG Crosshair Hero VIII mobo, but being a creature of habit, I can't help but think of getting a little one for the OS. However I keep reading people suggesting one big storage drive is just fine?

What I'm asking for I guess is a few sage words regarding whether I should get a big 2tb M.2 drive, for my OS and whatever games I want to put on there. Or do I get one little one, and one bigger one to keep it all separate?

I don't store anything worth worrying about on my PC, so if it was to fail or anything like that, no worries, I just can't load a save.

So what do I do?

Also if you could suggest WHAT storage drive too, that would be awesome. I can read the numbers just fine on them, but it appears that doesn't necessarily mean it's superior.

Thanks in advance!
 
No sense to waste very limited M.2 slots for tiny drive.
Partitioning is for keeping things logically separate in case of needing to nuke Windows installation.

Even with HDD having OS on same physical drive than say games wasn't notable performance obstacle for as long as you had enough memory to avoid use of page file.
After initial booting/loading OS simply doesn't do much any drive operations.
And for any SSD those are entirely meaningless with no mechanical operation caused seek time penalties.

WD Blue SN550 would competent standard NVMe drive and at same price level with SATA drives.

After that depending on budget there would be higher up PCIe v3 NVMes and then PCIe v4 drives.
Though only few games are coded/made well enough to be able to use high transfer rates, especially sequential speeds.
 
Thanks for the response. You pretty much confirm what I was suspecting to be honest, so thanks for that.

I'm looking at possibly getting a 2tb PCIE v3 or v4 then. I'm willing to pay up to £200 as that seems reasonable. Other than the WD suggested easier, would anything else be worth looking at?

Thanks!
 
Currently WD Black SN750 is the sensible choise for full PCIe v3 speed drive above entry level Blue SN550.
(for very write intensive usage some Phison E12 based drives would be better)
5GB/s capable Phison E16 controller drives are next step up.


WD Blue SN550 2TB SSD NVME M.2 2280 PCIe Gen3 Solid State Drive (WDS200T2B0C)= £149.99
WD Black SN750 2TB M.2 2280 NVME PCI-E Gen3 Solid State Drive (WDS200T3X0C)= £199.99
TeamGroup T-Force Cardea Zero Z440 2TB NVMe PCIe Gen4 M.2 Solid State Drive= £239.99


Here's review showing how loading times behave with different SSDs in games without processing bottleneck:
https://www.realhardwarereviews.com/silicon-power-us70-1tb-review/11/
As you can see even budget NVMe SSD like Crucial P1 leaves SATA SSD into dust cloud.
Then next group is full PCIe v3 speed drives, with 5G/s Firecuda 520 and Silicon Power US70 leading.

But most of the games use code designed for spinning rust with lots of processing and data initialization bottlenecking SSDs to in general same level.
 
What I'm asking for I guess is a few sage words regarding whether I should get a big 2tb M.2 drive, for my OS and whatever games I want to put on there.

Don't bother getting a v4 drive: you won't notice the difference. And don't go small: you'll be looking to replace it sooner than you think. Treat yourself and get yourself a 4 TB or 8 TB drive.

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £1,708.68 (includes shipping: £8.70)​
 
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