Partition vs multiple drives?

M

Maddnotez

Limp Gawd
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Nov 28, 2014
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Not sure if this is the right sub forum. Looking for pros and cons on using a single M.2 for windows and games with a partition vs using a separate M.2 for each.

If separate is better that is fine, I can get two but my motherboard has only one PCIE 5.0 and then other 4.0, so which would be better for the games vs windows?
 
That sound in part a 1997 conversation, with a different partition for the virtual memory.... ( I am not sure if it ever made a difference in the past, but now it will not)

Partition bring issue with managing their size for not much obvious possible gain, you can make them virtual and auto-expendable now if you want a different letter I think.

About no game will have a perceivable difference from a pci 5 vs pci 4 drive soon would be a reasonable assumption (4 vs a good pci 3.0 drive being already quite a challenge to find), go with price-rebate and personal preference for non-performance reason.
 
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It's mainly up to you but I do both. I have multiple drives and I have drives with partitions. Dual booting Linux/Windows requires this as I have both OSes on one NVME but also have partitions on the HDD as well for each OS. Even then I still have additional partitions on the NVME. Things which don't require any type of reinstall always go on a different partition from the system partitions. This saves a ton of time later on if and when I need to reinstall one or both OSes. I never install games on the system partition. In the case of Windows the less the Program Files directories are used the better I like it.

I recently bought and installed an additional NVME drive for my main system but haven't started making use of it yet. It's likely I'll eventually have most of my newish games on that and probably move over the games I currently have on my 1TB NVME and keep the 1TB primarily as an OS drive. Older games that don't make use of SSD speeds I'll leave on the HDD.

It's up to you how you want to do it. I always partition to keep things which don't need to be on system partitions separate for various reasons. I use multiple drives because the space is needed. Having everything on a single drive even with partitions can be simpler. Having multiple drives increases possible failure points but also means you're less like to lose or need to restore from backup as many things if one of the drives dies. You'll need to decide the positive and negative aspects and which is more important to you.
 
I think partitions made sense back in the mechanical drive days, but with SSDs my approach has just been to go as big as possible and use folders wisely 😅

Generally speaking anything that is not "installable" (i.e., documents and photos), I put on a separate disk, in case my Windows install gets hosed.
 
Those drives are so fast you're not going to have any issues installing Windows and games on the same drive.

I still use separate drives for my OS and files, but that's because it makes things easier when I have to reinstall Windows - just nuke the system disk and everything else is still there after reinstall.
 
There is no performance gain in partitions for day to day use. 99% of apps and games require the registry anyways so if your OS get's hosed, you have to reinstall them anyways... Unless they are steam games which you can just point to the directory the files were and it will fix them, sure, save time if you got crappy Inet connection.

If your OS tanks, easy to get back in these days, but you should have backups anyways of say Docs,Pics, Vids you want to keep, ideally on a NAS or other device not connected to your main computer, incase it is a hardware failure.

I have partitions as above, I run linux dist. as my main OS< but do boot into windows once in a while for things I can not run in a VM (a game usually)
 
bigdogchris said:
Those drives are so fast you're not going to have any issues installing Windows and games on the same drive.

I still use separate drives for my OS and files, but that's because it makes things easier when I have to reinstall Windows - just nuke the system disk and everything else is still there after reinstall.
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I just built a new box for myself and dropped a 4TB NVME in it for the OS and whatever else I want to install... Still just couldn't stop myself from putting a 2TB NVME in for games, but I know it really will not make any difference in performance.
 
If you are playing a game that streams a lot of data textures like MSFS and screen recording, it helps to have two separate drives to isolate the recording to a different disk.
 
noxqzs said:
If you are playing a game that streams a lot of data textures like MSFS and screen recording, it helps to have two separate drives to isolate the recording to a different disk.
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Would have to stream an incredible amount of data to come anywhere near saturating a PCIe 4 bus.
 
FrgMstr said:
Would have to stream an incredible amount of data to come anywhere near saturating a PCIe 4 bus.
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From a throughput standpoint, I agree, the bus has more than enough bandwidth. In practice its a different thing. I especially see it with x-plane during low level flight. I can average a high fps but every 5-10 seconds, I would get a micro stutter with textures loading in. Usually my first assumption would be cpu for that type of problem, but it turned out to be disk access. From my observations, even though the drives have high transfer rates, those rates are usually when you are transferring really large files. Once you start sending many files that are kilobytes or megabytes, that transfer rate plummets due to IOPS limitations.
 
noxqzs said:
From a throughput standpoint, I agree, the bus has more than enough bandwidth. In practice its a different thing. I especially see it with x-plane during low level flight. I can average a high fps but every 5-10 seconds, I would get a micro stutter with textures loading in. Usually my first assumption would be cpu for that type of problem, but it turned out to be disk access. From my observations, even though the drives have high transfer rates, those rates are usually when you are transferring really large files. Once you start sending many files that are kilobytes or megabytes, that transfer rate plummets due to IOPS limitations.
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What exact model drive were you seeing that on?
 
970 evo. I know its not pcie4 but i see similar issues when pulling large transfers with small file size in other programs.
 
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