Question Benefits of separating OS and Games on multiple M.2 SSDs ?

[CAPSL0CKS0N]

Please completely disregard cost of hardware.

I feel like most of the information I've found so far doesn't give enough detail, I know there are plenty of people who choose to seperate, I know some people buy a small drive for OS and a larger drive for games.
I know some people anecdotally think one method or another is "better".

I'm considering a couple scenarios and would like to know which option will provide the absolute best performance for games, for OS/general tasks, or if there would be no difference.

If I have 2x m.2 drives that are identical, is there any performance benefit from separating the OS from games? is there a limit with SSD drives where less than 5% or 10% remaining drive space will reduce performance?

if I have 2x m.2 drives, one faster read/write than the other what combination would result in the optimal performance? OS on slow drive and games on fast? Games on slow drive and OS on fast? OS and games both on fast and slow drive is discarded/used for other files non-game related.

I *think* that with the identical drives it shouldn't matter, they're both connected to the PCIe bus it *may* be faster to separate if the bottleneck was ever the speed of the PCIe bus (being throttled 1 vs. the other) but at this time the i9 14900KS rates at about 5 GT/s and the PCIe 6.0 bus maxes out at 64 GT/s therefore CPU bottlenecks before the bus (right?)

I dono, I could be missing a whole lot of information, I'm by no means an expert when it comes to PC building/component optimization.

Sorry if this has already been covered, but I haven't seen anywhere anyone going into the actual depth of discussion that I'm interested in.

 

[dwd999]

My view is that the benefit of separating the OS and data storage is that it gives you an easy way to back up your OS when its working well so that you can easily restore it when it gets messed up. You can even use a program like Macrium to back up your OS to your data drive if you use Macrium's feature to create a bootable rescue USB to boot from.

 

[CAPSL0CKS0N]

My view is that the benefit of separating the OS and data storage is that it gives you an easy way to back up your OS when its working well so that you can easily restore it when it gets messed up. You can even use a program like Macrium to back up your OS to your data drive if you use Macrium's feature to create a bootable rescue USB to boot from.

I see a lot of replies like this when this topic comes up and it is completely irrelevant to my question and what I'm interested in.
I appreciate the response but I am entirely focused on performance, I am hoping to find a better understanding about how the separation of hardware may or may not increase or diminish performance, even in the absolute minute slightest way and especially if both sets of hardware are not identical (see the second part of my question).

 

[hotaru.hino]

It does nothing to improve or reduce performance in any practical way.

A game will load almost all of what it needs on the initial load. Everything else after that is usually assets that are streamed in from whatever location the game's installed.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, there might be a slight benefit that separating the two might have.

The OS drive is going to be periodically hit with something, usually from another app. While this usually has no impact on performance in game, especially if the game has no need to load additional assets while you're playing (e.g., a deathmatch style game), it may introduce hiccups if the game has to load something but something else needs to access the OS drive. If it's an OS process, then it'll likely get priority, making the game wait until it's done.

 

[TerryLaze]

EDIT: Now that I think about it, there might be a slight benefit that separating the two might have.

The OS drive is going to be periodically hit with something, usually from another app. While this usually has no impact on performance in game, especially if the game has no need to load additional assets while you're playing (e.g., a deathmatch style game), it may introduce hiccups if the game has to load something but something else needs to access the OS drive. If it's an OS process, then it'll likely get priority, making the game wait until it's done.

But even then nvme drives have seek rates so low and can access that many sectors at once. It's should be an extremely low chance of any of that to happen.

 

[USAFRet]

I appreciate the response but I am entirely focused on performance, I am hoping to find a better understanding about how the separation of hardware may or may not increase or diminish performance, even in the absolute minute slightest way and especially if both sets of hardware are not identical (see the second part of my question).

Performance is a wash.

And even if there were a benefit or detriment one way or the other, that would not necessarily be the same for all systems.
You'd have to do an A<->B comparison with your hardware.
And I'd be VERY VERY surprised if you saw any user facing difference.