Tweed :
Ok thanks azaran. Another reason for having 2 SSDs vs 1 SSD was that having 2 SSDs would make it easier if I had any viruses, it would be easier to uninstall/install things again from what I've read/have been told. For my RAM, I had the longest struggle researching whether to get 4x8GB or 2x(2x8GB). People have said many things, but what made me decide to get 2 kits versus 1 kit, was because a 4x8GB was for a quad channel kit, not a dual channel kit. They referred to this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D8fhsXqq4o and said this:
"There are probably four RAM slots on your motherboard. The first set of two has one color, the other set of two has another color.
Each colour can accommodate one dual-channel kit (2x8gb, for example).
So if my motherboard has 4 slots, two of them are green, the other two red, I plug my first set of 2x8gb into the green slots, and my second set of 2x8gb into the red slots.
The kits of 2x8gb are designed to work together in dual channel. So if you want to get 32gb / four pieces of RAM, get two kits of 2x8gb. Make sure you install the ones of the same kit into one set of matching slots, and the second kit into the other set of matching slots."
Thats right, your from the Apple world. I don't mean this to be condescending, because I deal with people either switching over from the Apple experience or people who have to work in both worlds on a daily basis. You're overly concerned about the impact of viruses on your system and what you'd have to do if you got one. If you have to do a system wipe due to a virus, you're uninstalling and reinstalling everything. If your reinstalling the boot drive, it doesn't matter if your games and programs are on another drive, you'll have to reload them after reloading the OS for the programs to work. Unless of course you're creating a system image on creation, which will have to be recreated or patched every time you make any change in installations. The only thing having multiple hard drives does is that specific instance is having a place to backup your data when you wipe everything and you're setup with that already with the HDD your picking up. An argument could be made for dealing with Ransomware, but if you're setting up a secondary HDD to store all of your personal data (SSD should only be for OS and programs), then your as protected from that as you can get. However I would strongly recommend setting up a backup drive for important data. Not just for protection from that level of viruses but just as a good precaution against when you have a drive failure at some point in the future.
If you're concerned about virus protection, which you should be its a valid concern, I'd look less at hardware (except a backup, always have a backup) and instead look at a quality antivirus and anti-maleware suite. Bitdefender, Kaspersky and Avira are three of the highest rated products out there. For anti Malware, look at a free version of Malwarebytes for on demand scanning or the paid version so it runs at bootup the same way antivirus does.
Now if your heart is set on multiple SSDs go for it, peace of mind for $143 bucks is a pretty cheap price.
As for the dual channel vs quad channel thing. You have it a bit reversed. Two dual channel kits have a chance to have been from two difference batch creations of the sticks. This means there is a small chance that the two kits may have some slight difference in manufacturing that can cause problems in a board. That's why using two dual channel kits for a quad channel motherboard isn't recommended by people who strive for absolute compatibility. And the same goes for dual channel motherboard boards as well. If you're going to populate all the slots, its best to do it with identical sticks and preferably from the same batch. This way there's less or no chance of the two sets having different properties that the motherboard has to work around. Kits aren't really designed to run dual or triple or quad channel, there's no setting in the RAM stick that says "this must be run in quad not dual". The sticks in the kits are put there because they came out of the same manufacturing batch and so were all created equal. This is what you want from a kit, identical behavior of the sticks. So from a batch of a thousand sticks, they'll put some percentage of them in dual kits, some in quad kits. It's dictated by the market, not some inherent programing in the RAM. This is an over simplification but you get the general idea. That being said, if you want to pick up two dual channel kits instead of a quad, go for it. The likelihood of there actually being a difference in the sticks great enough to cause a problem is pretty damn small if they're bought at the same time. If you were buying one kit today and another 2 years from now, the chances increase. The only real downside to you doing two dual channel kits realistically is it costs more.
As for people going with separate SSDs for OS and games, part of it I'd wager is a hold over from the days when SSD's first hit the market. A 120gig was recommended because thats all you needed for the OS and most normal programs that would benefit from the SSD's speed. And you'd load things that didn't benfit from an SSD on to a HDD. The only thing games befit from the SSD is load time. Performance in the game has little to nothing to do with an SSD. So when you were paying $200 for a 120GB you put the stuff that mattered on it. Also high capacity drives were not prevalent in the market. 120GB was in reach of some people, a 500GB was absurdly priced and 1TB didn't exist. Now you pay $143 for a top end mainstream 500GB drive. Space constraints doesn't matter as much for normal programs, now the file size issues are largely for media files. One season of a 1080p TV show can take up 50GB, file size for photoshop files can easily be a few GB per image, hell just the music collection for some people I know would fill a 500GB drive by themselves.
The other big reason would be paranoia over how many writes to a drive the SSD can do. Again this is a hold over from the early days of SSDs where the paranoia was a little bit earned. With two drives you reduce the amount of writes to one drive by spreading it out between two drives. That's not really a concern with modern drives. The 850 evo is rated to insane levels. If you write 20GB of data to the drive every day, its life expectancy is 93.5 years. Thats not a typo, 93.5 years. If you write 100GB of data to the drive a day its life expectancy is 9.5 years. If you're writing 100GB a day to that drive manually, you better be getting paid enough that you can replace it in less than 10 years. Hell, if you have anything in your computer last 9.5 years without becoming obsolete and being replaced I'd be pretty shocked.
That said, if you micromanage your build, you can may be able to squeeze out a bit of performance in a benchmark by running separate drives. The average person, running a normal setup will never really see this increase in performance. But what they will see is the increase in cost of the build and time lost managing their build and installs. That saved money could be put towards better storage with a higher capacity drive HDD, a backup solution (have I mentioned you should have a backup setup? Because you should have a backup in place) or if they're really in to gaming getting a better monitor, better GPU, better keyboard, better mouse, etc.
This is all of course just my two cents. But I've built a lot of systems in my day in both personal and professional settings. In that time I have spent way, way, too much of my life dealing with complicated and convoluted setups that at the end of the day just succeeded in sucking time better spent on other projects. Its why I really stress the K.I.S.S philosophy; Keep It Simple Stupid.
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