Question Would I benefit from a separate boot drive?

[Bladestorm]

I'm building a PC, and my main storage component will be a Samsung 980 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME SSD. I've read recently that folks will have separate drive just to hold their OS (Windows 10 in my case). Would this benefit me? I have never considered it, because I assumed it wouldn't be any faster than booting up to my main drive. If I would benefit, how would I do it?


J

 

[USAFRet]

I'm building a PC, and my main storage component will be a Samsung 980 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME SSD. I've read recently that folks will have separate drive just to hold their OS (Windows 10 in my case). Would this benefit me? I have never considered it, because I assumed it wouldn't be any faster than booting up to my main drive. If I would benefit, how would I do it?


J

First off, it is NEVER "just Windows".
It is all your applications as well.

Multiple drives can be a good thing, or simply more hassle.

The simplicity of a single large drive appeals to many.,
Others, a drive for the OS and applications, other drives for other things.

Mostly, personal preference.

And "booting up" is a trivial thing to measure.

 

[cryoburner]

Having a separate boot drive would not likely provide any perceptible performance benefit. An NVMe drive will tend to have fast enough access times and transfer rates that it should be able to handle multiple requests from the OS, applications and things like games simultaneously. It's not like having the OS on a platter-based hard drive, where the access times are so slow that performance can slow to a crawl when performing more than one disk-intensive task at once.

And the endurance rating of that 1TB drive is also high enough where write endurance isn't likely to be a concern outside of certain specialized use cases involving an abnormally large amount of writes to the drive on a daily basis.

 

[USAFRet]

^^^^^^'
Agree with the above.

1 drive or multiple drives is a personal preference as to data locations. Performance is not impacted either way.

 

[JohnBonhamsGhost]

If I would benefit, how would I do it?

the biggest benefit from it that i've found is having things more easily organized and separated in case of drive or OS failure.

one example is backups can be completed much easier.
having your OS and applications separate from your personal files(media, text, work projects, etc) can make this an easier task.
if you have intermittent disk backups occurring regularly there will be less data on an OS\apps drive than if it also included large amounts of personal data and vice versa.
and having these backups separate when looking to restore one of them keeps you from having to wipe\replace all OS & personal data at once.

also if you have a case of OS corruption or just want to reinstall you won't have to worry about backing up and replacing files if they're already stored on a separate drive.
i currently have ~3TB of games installed and if i had to relocate & restore or reinstall them every time i wanted to install\reinstall the OS it would be quite a hassle.
so having them on a separate disk makes this much easier.

i also keep a separate drive for downloads, temporary files, and other quick projects to keep the drive wear down on my main drives and to also have these files separated in case of OS problems appearing while in the midst of something.
this way i can usually pick up where i left off without losing the data due to OS failure.