Where does fastest storage drive matter most: Boot Drive or Games Drive?

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trevorhood

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Oct 13, 2017
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I'm going to upgrade my PC and I've been toying around with the idea of using a PCI-e SSD.

If I were to get one PCI-e SSD and one SATA III SSD, which should I use for my boot drive and which should I use for my games drive?

I would appreciate any advice.
 
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The reason your getting conflicting answers is because, well, it depends. On games like fallout 4 where you have to load everytime you enter a building, an SSD will have a huge impact. You don't think about it too much but when you gotta load 3x in quick succession, that reduces loading times from 1 minutes to 18 or so seconds, that's a lot of waiting you just saved yourself. Compound that over an hour and you get a lot more gaming in than if you had a mechanical.

On other games however you just have one gigantic load time at the start and pretty much none afterwards, so in those cases it makes no difference.

And as always, SSD don't affect your FPS at all.

USAFRet

Titan
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For that usage, flip a coin.
But put the OS and other applications on the PCI-E drive. You'll be less likely to want to reuse that drive elsewhere in the future.

And of course, we don't know what the rest of your system is.
 

Karadjgne

Titan
Ambassador
I'd use the Sata 3 for boot drive and pci-e for games/storage. Whole heap less problems with Sata 3 being recognized as boot, NVMe drives can get funky, some needing raid drivers loaded with OS and being listed as boot Mgr etc. NVMe also doesn't work worth a damn on platforms prior to skylake, and not at all on Ivy-Bridge. So, as said several times earlier, knowing the rest of the system would help. Personally, I'd just invest in a single larger Sata 3 or if available to use, an m.2 NVMe over the pci-e.
 

trevorhood

Prominent
Oct 13, 2017
2
0
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I'm just kicking around ideas at this point. I'm waiting for the Ryzen refresh to replace everything except case, GPU, PSU and my storage drive. So, there isn't really a "rest of the system" yet. I can tell you for sure that it will include a GTX 1070 and that it will be a windows 10 system with all brand-new hardware, but that's about it.

The essence of my question is: where would extra storage drive speed matter most: boot drive or games drive?

I'm hearing mixed answers, all for reasons that have nothing to do with speed and everything to do with how quirky PCI-e SSDs are. Would an m.2 NVMe be better at this point in time?
 

Supermuncher85

Distinguished
The reason your getting conflicting answers is because, well, it depends. On games like fallout 4 where you have to load everytime you enter a building, an SSD will have a huge impact. You don't think about it too much but when you gotta load 3x in quick succession, that reduces loading times from 1 minutes to 18 or so seconds, that's a lot of waiting you just saved yourself. Compound that over an hour and you get a lot more gaming in than if you had a mechanical.

On other games however you just have one gigantic load time at the start and pretty much none afterwards, so in those cases it makes no difference.

And as always, SSD don't affect your FPS at all.
 
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