Fastest SSD as windows/boot drive or gaming drive?

jpinard

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 10, 2004
Messages
194
I have several SSD’s, and just got a Samsung M.2 970 which is much faster than my other SSD’s.

So the question now becomes, do I install that as my primary windows drive with whatever games might fit (it’s 500 Gig), or do I make it my game drive for games that are more HD intensive?

I don’t know how much windows cache is swapped, and how much windows is accessed during gaming, but that’s what I care about the most.
 
Game load times are not going to be that differrent on an Nvme drive vs a sata SSD as part of the load is decompressing data, you may gain 1 or 2 seconds depending on the game.

I would recommend using it as the main system drive but even then you will be hard pressed to find real tangible differences.
 
Game load times are not going to be that differrent on an Nvme drive vs a sata SSD as part of the load is decompressing data, you may gain 1 or 2 seconds depending on the game.

I would recommend using it as the main system drive but even then you will be hard pressed to find real tangible differences.

Ok thanks! I’ll use it as main system drive then
 
One of the tricks in the spinning HD era was putting the OS on one drive and pointing the temp and cache files to a 2nd drive. Might be worth some experimentation. Might start with OS on fastest, temp/cache on 2nd fastest and game on other. Thinking reading often faster then writing so reading your game files from a slower drive then writing the temp results to a faster drive might see some speed gain.

Could be that everything is fast enough you won't really notice any difference.
 
One of the tricks in the spinning HD era was putting the OS on one drive and pointing the temp and cache files to a 2nd drive.

I’ve thought about that as well, but curiously I’ve not seen anyone talk about it in a long time.
 
Game load times are not going to be that differrent on an Nvme drive vs a sata SSD as part of the load is decompressing data, you may gain 1 or 2 seconds depending on the game.

I would recommend using it as the main system drive but even then you will be hard pressed to find real tangible differences.
Way back in the Quake 3/CS1.6 days those two seconds being first loaded into the match felt good ;)
 
Game load times are not going to be that differrent on an Nvme drive vs a sata SSD as part of the load is decompressing data, you may gain 1 or 2 seconds depending on the game.

I would recommend using it as the main system drive but even then you will be hard pressed to find real tangible differences.

This.

Going from SATA SSD to NVMe I honestly do not notice any faster level loading etc in games. Maybe a fraction of a second better, best case being a MMO and I see maybe a 1 second faster load, if games are the only use, better off getting a bigger SATA SSD to keep more things on it than a NVMe drive. Pretty big change in OS and day to day use however. So much so that I will be installing my old 1TB SATA SSD to install my steam collection on and move them off of the NVMe 1TB to free up some room, as I do photoshop/video editing on my gaming rig as well, which do see a nice gain in speed over the SATA SSD.
 
Yeah point your caches and system managed Pagefile (don't bother tweaking it anymore with Win10) to another fast drive with low latency and that's about it. You won't notice much difference but it will be about as optimised as possible.

At least the system can pull/write necessary data from two places at the same time. Might help a little.
 
I remember the days of bf2 using 2-3 disks in RAID 0 so you could load the map before the 30 second game start timer finished (on mutiplayer server the timer started right away when map changes) we could get across the map at times before everyone els joined as it was taking 60seconds to 1min 30 seconds to load the map on one hdd spinner

With ssd made this mute point, for game drive the main os ssd drive or secondary SSD for games space really what dictates where you want it (only benefits having it on a second drive is the steam library as you can back them up or just leave them there when you reload windows just point steam back to your second drive steam folder)
 
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