OS or games on fastest drive? Does it even matter?

I have one NVME SSD and two SATA - would using the fastest drive for Win10 instead of one of the slower SSDs make any practical difference in games and daily usage?

no. difference between nvme and ssd for os and games isnt much. you'd only see the big difference during file transfers and benchmarking.

If you have to pick, put the OS / home directories on the NVME. Games really don't care, but the OS / home will get some benefit, even if not huge.

Games will load a little faster off your fastest HD including loading between game levels. I put my OS and the few games I play the most on my NVME drive.

Agree with the prior posts. OS pretty much always goes on the fastest drive, and it's unlikely you're going to see any difference between NVMe and SATA for hosting games.

100% personal preference.

For me the OS sits on the fastest drive.

OS + game I'm currently playing at minimum would be on my fastest drive. Everything else can go on the other drives.

I put my OS on the fastest but It would be interesting to see some benchmarks for different games.

I remember seeing benchmarks a long time ago, but that was for games that only took a couple seconds to load to begin with.

The testing that I have seen is that game loading is only marginally affected by having faster SSD's, as long as you reach a certain threshold.

We are talking less than a second difference between all common NVME models.

I'd boot off of the NVME drive, and maybe install the one or two games you care about the most on it, and the rest on sata.

Im also on the "OS sits on fastest drive" camp.

I'm wokring on an SSD Nas though for games to cut out the local drives on multiple boxes....

OS on the fastest Drive

For games, the only improvement is load time.

Personally:

OS on fastest drive, Games on a 2TB 7200RPM Drive mainly.

If it is a new game I intend to play through I will install it to fastest drive for the first playthrough then use STEAM Library manager to move it to the slower 2TB Drive after. Also, I keep my favourite Multiplayer games on the SSD so I can join the game as quickly as possible (so you don't load in dead during the match )

Load time comparision:

Vote for OS on the fastest drive here too. Unless it's larger than your other SSD then I say load the larger one full of games and use the other one for the OS.

Everyone seems to be saying the fastest drive should be the OS but I'm wondering what the justification, reasoning, and proof for it is?

Out of curiosity I monitored 5 mins of activity on my OS drive while loading programs off a completely separate drive. During that 5 mins the OS read <200mb, and wrote <50mb. While the drive I loaded programs from (just random games) would've gone through GBs of reads.

The only task I can see it benefiting is windows update and virus scan times. Boot time differences from whatever I can see is pretty similar to game load differences and I wouldn't think is significant (how many times do you boot per day?).

This is assuming a comparison between a SATA SSD and NVMe SSD, not a HDD (OS) vs NVMe SSD/SATA SSD.

limitedaccess said:

Everyone seems to be saying the fastest drive should be the OS but I'm wondering what the justification, reasoning, and proof for it is?

Out of curiosity I monitored 5 mins of activity on my OS drive while loading programs off a completely separate drive. During that 5 mins the OS read <200mb, and wrote <50mb. While the drive I loaded programs from (just random games) would've gone through GBs of reads.

The only task I can see it benefiting is windows update and virus scan times. Boot time differences from whatever I can see is pretty similar to game load differences and I wouldn't think is significant (how many times do you boot per day?).

This is assuming a comparison between a SATA SSD and NVMe SSD, not a HDD (OS) vs NVMe SSD/SATA SSD.

Click to expand...

Depends on your usecase, also read speed =/= iops which is what makes it feel snappy.

If we are talking game loading times NVMe vs SATA is not that different as part of the load time is decompressing stuff on the CPU or GPU and you could also put some of those on your OS drive like the ones you play the most or benefit from streaming a lot of data like open world games, but for other things like real time video editing you might be better of doing that on the fastest drive iso the OS

limitedaccess said:

Everyone seems to be saying the fastest drive should be the OS but I'm wondering what the justification, reasoning, and proof for it is?

Out of curiosity I monitored 5 mins of activity on my OS drive while loading programs off a completely separate drive. During that 5 mins the OS read <200mb, and wrote <50mb. While the drive I loaded programs from (just random games) would've gone through GBs of reads.

The only task I can see it benefiting is windows update and virus scan times. Boot time differences from whatever I can see is pretty similar to game load differences and I wouldn't think is significant (how many times do you boot per day?).

This is assuming a comparison between a SATA SSD and NVMe SSD, not a HDD (OS) vs NVMe SSD/SATA SSD.

Click to expand...

No right or wrong answer with this one. 100% personal preference, and the gear you have jammed into your machine dictates direction. Ive been rocking an ssd and WD 4tb sshd for a few years now. it maybe great for me.. Other people may want to throw it off a bridge. Outside of bragging rights, and how long you are willing to wait for something to load.. it just doesn't freaking matter.

basically what Dodge245 is what i would do if i had ran out of space on my 1TB NVME SSD

there is no benefit putting games on NVME and OS on SATA, but there is slightly faster OS response and boot time with having OS on the NVME (and games on NVME with the OS or separate SATA SSD)

typical config seems to be NVME SSD + SATA SSD + 4TB HDD or a large SATA SSD or NVME + HDD

the price diferance between 250gb and 500gb is less then £20-30 now so i wouldn't bother with 250gb any more

game load times have almost 0 benefit been on a NVME , a SATA ssd is way more then fine (as your CPU limited when loading games with any SSD) but if you have the space on your NVME SSD go right ahead and use it

i wouldn't use a HDD for any type of actively used stuff just to slow (as that youtube video shows)

also don't buy dramless SSDs not worth the price saving,, BX500, kingston A400, WD GREEN , WD Blue is little odd ball as it lacks dram chip on the newer line but it has a small amount of ram inside the controller so unsure if it has issues with wear leveling and write slow downs on large amount of stored data over 60%, and some sandisk ssds i think Plus ones are dramless but i haven't touched sandisk for years after 4 of them failed, and QLC drives not to hot at the moment as they can drop to speeds slower then a HDD if you write enough data to them in one go