Question Combining different speed hard drives

[Jayfaas]

Hey all. I have a computer with an ADATA Legend 800 Gold M.2 NVMe drive, and am thinking about buying a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB drive for more space for games and such. Would it be possible to just extend the partition over to this drive, or will that cause issues because of the speed difference?

ADATA - 3500 MB read, 2800 write
Samsung 990 Pro - 7,450 read, 6,900 write

 

[USAFRet]

Hey all. I have a computer with an ADATA Legend 800 Gold M.2 NVMe drive, and am thinking about buying a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB drive for more space for games and such. Would it be possible to just extend the partition over to this drive, or will that cause issues because of the speed difference?

ADATA - 3500 MB read, 2800 write
Samsung 990 Pro - 7,450 read, 6,900 write

"extend the partition" is basically a RAID 0.
Which you do NOT want to do. At all. Ever.
Especially with drives of different performance.

Among other problems, it would run at the speed of the slowest, and be limited to 2x the size of the smallest.


"games and such" are no problem across multiple drives. My main system has 6.

The various game platforms are pretty easy to make work with multiple, individual drives.
Steam especially.

 

[SkyNetRising]

"extend the partition" is basically a RAID 0.
Which you do NOT want to do. At all. Ever.
Especially with drives of different performance.

Minor correction.
Extending a volume across multiple drives converts involved drives to dynamic and
creates a spanned volume.
Raid 0 equivalent is striped volume. Those are very different.

Striped vs spanned volumes:
https://forum.huawei.com/enterprise.../thread/710927658797383680-667213859733254144

But other than that, I can only agree.
Stay away from dynamic disks and any kind of raid
(unless absolutely necessary and you know, what you're doing).

 

[USAFRet]

Minor correction.
Extending a volume across multiple drives converts involved drives to dynamic and
creates a spanned volume.
Raid 0 equivalent is striped volume. Those are very different.

Yes, you are correct.

 

[Jayfaas]

Will there be a loss in performance since the Windows drive will be slower? I would assume it will have to interact with the windows drive during gameplay for drivers and such.

 

[USAFRet]

Will there be a loss in performance since the Windows drive will be slower? I would assume it will have to interact with the windows drive during gameplay for drivers and such.

"slower", between an ADATA Legend and a Samsung 990 Pro?

Not in any way noticeable, especially in a game system.

 

[USAFRet]

In other words, moving everything to the 990 Pro will NOT give you any real performance benefit.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Will there be a loss in performance since the Windows drive will be slower?

What type of computer is this? Specs?
Does it allow installation of multiple M.2 drives?

I'd just add second drive and move game library there.