Storage Management

What's the best way to configure a system with the various storage devices out there?

I have at my disposal: m.2 128gb, 240gb SSD, 480gb SSD, 2Tb 7200rpm hard drive.

I was for a long time building my systems trying to use a 120gb SSD as my boot drive and load all of my software onto that SSD. A 1Tb Hard drive was installed for any data. And, that's served me well for my surfing computers and my business computers where the OS and all the software would easily fit on even a 120gb SSD.

Now, I'm building my son a new gaming system and with the amount of games he has, Windows 10, and Office 2016. I'm not sure they'll all fit onto even a 480gb SSD.

Does it matter if the games are installed onto the 2Tb 7200 RPM hard drive with the OS on an m.2 or SSD device? Should I just go with the 480gb SSD with as many programs and games I can fit on the SSD and then go over to the 7200RPM Hard drive for any programs/games that don't fit on the SSD?

I tend to put games that stream data a lot on SSD like mmo's or open world games like GTA, Fallout etc...

Games that pause gameplay to load lvls I put on regular HDD though it does not matter that much with a 7.200rpm drive.

Agree with Denpepe, and if the games are on Steam you can just set up a library on each drive, then pick when you install the game which library the game is installed to.

I just read up on on the the Hybrid drives. With the Seagate Firecuda 2Tb drives for $100 at Microcenter. It seems like a good compromise. Install the 128gb m.2 for Win10 and Office 2016 and any other non-gaming software on it and install his Steam games and other games on the Hybrid hard drive. Seems like the Firecude got good reviews for this purpose and a 5 year warranty to boot.

Hello psnco. Thank you for considering Seagate. Our FireCuda drives are made for gaming as they meld the latest NAND flash technology with a traditional hard drive for a compact blend of capacity and speeds up to 5× faster than typical hard drives. This means that games and cut scenes load faster and as your son has many games, he can store up to 40 games per TB (at 25GB per game). Game on!