Question Is it necessary to have two drives in your computer?

pancakeloverz

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Aug 14, 2017
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I am building a gaming PC soon and I am wondering whether I need a boot drive and a second drive. I was thinking about just buying one large ssd that would have windows on it and all the other stuff. Alternatively i would buy a smaller ssd for boot and then a second ssd for all my stuff n games. (I dont like hard drives) What would you recommend?
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Necessary? No.

Some people like more than one drive, other people swear by a single large drive for everything.

Personally, I prefer multiple drives.
1 for the OS and applications, other drives for other things.

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DMAN999

Dignified
Ambassador
It is entirely up to you.
A single SSD will work fine.
I personally like an SSD for the OS and applications and a HDD for storing videos, pictures and backups.
In my current PC I have 2 500 GB SSD's, 1 1TB SSD, 3 internal HDD's and 1 external HDD. I bought them one at a time over the last few years when I had extra cash.
I keep a back up of important files on 1 internal HDD and on the external HDD.
With all these drives if one or even two failed it would not cause me any stress at all.
 
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most people are using the SSD + HDD combo mainly because SSD drives get pricier (or used to be) depending on the storage you are looking for . plus some are looking for HDD up to 4TB+ which do not exist for SSD drives right now in the consumer segment

depending on your budget the minimum SSD you should get for windows is 250GB
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
I like 2 drives as windows isn't perfect and can need to be reinstalled occasionally, and having 2 drives means I can have everything safe on 1 drive and blow windowe away and only lose time.

boot drive just has windows and any applications I need to reinstall with it
other drive has documents, music, pictures, movies, steam games, etc. Everything i don't want to have to download again. It means downtime after a clean install is minimal.

So basically I could buy a 250 gb ssd (mby nvme) for the OS and have another ssd for stuff?

Yes, that works fine.
 

g-unit1111

Titan
Moderator
Thanks for the replies.
So basically I could buy a 250 gb ssd (mby nvme) for the OS and have another ssd for stuff?

Oh yeah nearly all of my machines have multiple drives. There' s no such thing as having too much storage. But if you do buy an M2 drive keep in mind that drive will use the SATA-0 and possibly SATA-1 port so make sure to get a motherboard that has multiple SATA ports.
 
It doesn't necessarily have to be internally, but one of the most widely recommended backup strategies for any data you value is the 3-2-1 method: Keep 3 copies of your data, 2 locally but on different mediums, with 1 offsite.

Using multiple internal drives would be one way of achieving the 2nd part of that, although you could also use things such as external drives, cloud/online backups, and/or a NAS device.