Separate OS drive benefits?

[tkline]

I'm going to be building a new game system.. I have the budget for a 1 TB SSD, and I don't expect to need more space than that or at least not anytime soon. So I was gonna get a 1 TB M.2 drive and use that for my one and only drive.

Or is there still an advantage to a separate system drive? I was thinking I could do something like a 128 GB system drive and separate ssd for storage but it seems like 1 big drive is more efficient.

What do you think is the better way to go?

 

[USAFRet]

Personally, I prefer a separate OS+application drive.

Is/when I need to reinstall the OS, all that other stuff is not affected. Steam games, doc/video/etc...all can live on a different drive.

But....a 128GB for the OS drive is, IMHO, too small these days. Look to a 250GB or larger.

 

[Sigil10470]

Having one drive certainly simplifies things, and it can always be partitioned if you want a stricter organization scheme, negating some of the difficulties that come from reinstalling the operating system.

 

[4745454b]

In the old days of spinning disks there was a performance advantage to putting the OS on it's own drive. The read/write heads were free to do whatever the OS wanted without having to move to the games folder, or whatever. This could lead to a small speed up over having a single drive where the read/write heads had to move all over. SSDs don't have read/write heads so this doesn't matter. There is the measure of how many instructions per second the controller could handle but that's not a huge concern unless you are getting a low end SSD.

The point that USAF brings up is still valid. Having your OS on one drive and data on another allows you to format your OS drive to reinstall windows without losing your pics and whatnot. You can have your data on the data drive and not worry about it. As I understand things you should be able to partition ~200GB of the 1TB drive into it's own drive and put the OS on that. Use the remaining space for data. Or get a second OS. My OS sits on my first SSD, while my Steam folder sits on it's own. I want to get a larger SSD for my steam folder and when I do that I'll move my current Steam SSD down to my OS, and retire that SSD.

 

[USAFRet]

My current config:

SSD 1 - OS and applications
SSD 2 - photo work ( i do a LOT of photo work)
SSD 3 - CAD and video work
SSD 4 - Games, doc, music, downloads, etc
SSD 5 - scratch space for applications that can use it (Lightroom, Paintshop Pro, Rhino3D, etc)

Note...all these drives did not appear in this PC from day 1. They were just added as time went on..

 

[captaincharisma]

haveing a drive for just the OS is a good way to keep your important data protected by having it on a separate HDD/SSD. if the OS somehow becomes corrupt all you have to do is format and reinstall windows on the OS drive and you don't have to worry about restoring any files like music and video. mind you you still have to reinstall all your programs after a clean install though