eracer1111 Posted February 22, 2021 Share Posted February 22, 2021 (edited) Hopefully the title says it all. Would you put the OS, Page File, and all other programs on a smaller, cheaper (not-top-of-the-line) 1TB SSD like an EVO 970, and dedicate a fast 512GB SSD like a Samsung EVO 980 Pro JUST for DCS and MSFS2020? Or would you not worry about it and put everything on a 2TB SSD like a Sabrent Rocket 4.0 or EVO 980 Pro? The computer will be primarily for gaming. Edited February 22, 2021 by eracer1111 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bossco82 Posted February 23, 2021 Share Posted February 23, 2021 (edited) If it helps I have the OS and all my games including DCS on. 1tb Sabrent Rocket M2 nvme Gen 4. I have no problems at all. This system is for gaming, web browsing and a little Photoshop etc. Just calculate your space required and get one big enough. I'm sure your aware of that already mate. Edited February 23, 2021 by Bossco82 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BitMaster Posted February 23, 2021 Share Posted February 23, 2021 Unless you do other things apart from gaming like Video Editing, Video Capture, Virtual Machines and alikes I would follow Bossco82's advice to start with. Get a 1-2TB drive, install it ALL on that NVMe and call it a day. You can always add drives down the road. The only good thing with more drives is that you can have the OS separately which makes it somewhat easier to manage OS reinstallations and preserving cold data ( pics, files, etc.. ) and DCS as it does not need to be installed to function, a copy and paste or reconnect the drive is all it needs, most games do not allow this, same for Office or other productive suites, they need an installation so you would not benefit from multiple drives other than performance gains if you work it hard. For a standard consumer PC, 1 main drive ( NVMe or Sata3 SSD )and 1 Backup drive (HDD 4+TB range size & best if USB that can be disconnected for ransomware protection ) is a good start. I run 4 Sata SSD's, 1 NVMe and 2 HDD's ( which are disabled in Bios for ransomware protection and only activated if I need them to backup stuff ) but I do lots of virtual machines and have tons of files ( pics, movies, files ) that I want detached from the OS drive...and I usually know what I am doing when messing with it so I dont get confused O_o. Gigabyte Aorus X570S Master - Ryzen 5900X - Gskill 64GB 3200/CL14@3600/CL14 - Asus 1080ti EK-waterblock - 4x Samsung 980Pro 1TB - 1x Samsung 870 Evo 1TB - 1x SanDisc 120GB SSD - Heatkiller IV - MoRa3-360LT@9x120mm Noctua F12 - Corsair AXi-1200 - TiR5-Pro - Warthog Hotas - Saitek Combat Pedals - Asus PG278Q 27" QHD Gsync 144Hz - Corsair K70 RGB Pro - Win11 Pro/Linux - Phanteks Evolv-X Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eracer1111 Posted February 24, 2021 Author Share Posted February 24, 2021 18 hours ago, BitMaster said: Unless you do other things apart from gaming like Video Editing, Video Capture, Virtual Machines and alikes I would follow Bossco82's advice to start with. Get a 1-2TB drive, install it ALL on that NVMe and call it a day. You can always add drives down the road. The only good thing with more drives is that you can have the OS separately which makes it somewhat easier to manage OS reinstallations and preserving cold data ( pics, files, etc.. ) and DCS as it does not need to be installed to function, a copy and paste or reconnect the drive is all it needs, most games do not allow this, same for Office or other productive suites, they need an installation so you would not benefit from multiple drives other than performance gains if you work it hard. For a standard consumer PC, 1 main drive ( NVMe or Sata3 SSD )and 1 Backup drive (HDD 4+TB range size & best if USB that can be disconnected for ransomware protection ) is a good start. I run 4 Sata SSD's, 1 NVMe and 2 HDD's ( which are disabled in Bios for ransomware protection and only activated if I need them to backup stuff ) but I do lots of virtual machines and have tons of files ( pics, movies, files ) that I want detached from the OS drive...and I usually know what I am doing when messing with it so I dont get confused O_o. Good idea to disconnect the backup drives until needed. I currently have USB drives backing up my laptop's drives, and they're always connected so the backups can run as scheduled. Thanks for that advice. Our office had a ransomware attack a few years ago, and to this day I don't know why it didn't get to our mirrored NAS data backups. Thank goodness it didn't. It was still a royal pain to rebuild all the workstations. Now I back up the workstations onto the NAS, and our data and accounting software lives in the cloud. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Leg2ion Posted February 24, 2021 Share Posted February 24, 2021 I always stick Windows, Office and any other Utility programs on a dedicated boot drive, and then separate games onto one drive and photos/photo editing on another. Just prefer the compartmentalisation for management when upgrading etc. AMD Ryzen 5 5600X; ASUS ROG Strix X570-F, Corsair Vengeance 64 GB (2x 32GB) 3600MHz; Seagate FireCuda 510 500GB M.2-2280 (OS); Samsung 860 EVO 2TB M.2-2280 (DCS); MSI GeForce RTX 3090 SUPRIM X 24GB OC GPU. TM Warthog Hotas; T.Flight Pedals; DelanClip/Trackhat. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eracer1111 Posted February 24, 2021 Author Share Posted February 24, 2021 1 minute ago, Leg2ion said: I always stick Windows, Office and any other Utility programs on a dedicated boot drive, and then separate games onto one drive and photos/photo editing on another. Just prefer the compartmentalisation for management when upgrading etc. That's where I am with my laptop. Appreciate the feedback, as I'm undecided about which way to go with a new gaming desktop build. How big is your boot drive? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Leg2ion Posted February 24, 2021 Share Posted February 24, 2021 Currently 250gb SSD, though just in the middle of a new build where I will be installing a 500gb M2 for boot. AMD Ryzen 5 5600X; ASUS ROG Strix X570-F, Corsair Vengeance 64 GB (2x 32GB) 3600MHz; Seagate FireCuda 510 500GB M.2-2280 (OS); Samsung 860 EVO 2TB M.2-2280 (DCS); MSI GeForce RTX 3090 SUPRIM X 24GB OC GPU. TM Warthog Hotas; T.Flight Pedals; DelanClip/Trackhat. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BitMaster Posted February 24, 2021 Share Posted February 24, 2021 1 hour ago, eracer1111 said: Good idea to disconnect the backup drives until needed. I currently have USB drives backing up my laptop's drives, and they're always connected so the backups can run as scheduled. Thanks for that advice. Our office had a ransomware attack a few years ago, and to this day I don't know why it didn't get to our mirrored NAS data backups. Thank goodness it didn't. It was still a royal pain to rebuild all the workstations. Now I back up the workstations onto the NAS, and our data and accounting software lives in the cloud. You might want to consider disabling SMB protocol to Backup your stuff and use SFTP instead. I use Acronis Backup Software ( Cyber something at the moment ) and it only establishes the secure SSH based FTP channel when doing backups and cuts it right after backing up. This way, the NAS Server is NOT visible in the network at all and all attempts to connect to it run to dev/null :). The only downside is that it will be slower since at least on Ubuntu Linux the SSHd runs on a single core, so your single core speed is your max performance. We use a 4790k and achieve about 35MB/sec, on SMB this is 3x faster but not as save when the sh!t hits the fan. Gigabyte Aorus X570S Master - Ryzen 5900X - Gskill 64GB 3200/CL14@3600/CL14 - Asus 1080ti EK-waterblock - 4x Samsung 980Pro 1TB - 1x Samsung 870 Evo 1TB - 1x SanDisc 120GB SSD - Heatkiller IV - MoRa3-360LT@9x120mm Noctua F12 - Corsair AXi-1200 - TiR5-Pro - Warthog Hotas - Saitek Combat Pedals - Asus PG278Q 27" QHD Gsync 144Hz - Corsair K70 RGB Pro - Win11 Pro/Linux - Phanteks Evolv-X Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bossco82 Posted February 24, 2021 Share Posted February 24, 2021 Yeah I should have added I have a 3TB Mech drive that just has data on it , no programs at all. Simply backups, photo's, videos and document files. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Voyager Posted February 26, 2021 Share Posted February 26, 2021 Hardware Unboxed did a bunch of drive tests, HDD vs SSD, SARA vs nVME, vs nVME PCIe 3.0 not that long ago: The TLDR is, for gaming, the only big difference is HDD vs SSD. Everything else is past the point of diminishing returns. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eracer1111 Posted December 24, 2022 Author Share Posted December 24, 2022 That's why I put games on the slower Gen3 2TB SSD. The OS and other software can definitely benefit from running on the Gen4 SSD's. The MSI B550A-Pro MOBO has one slot for Gen3 and one for Gen4. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tomcat_driver Posted December 24, 2022 Share Posted December 24, 2022 On 2/22/2021 at 3:43 PM, eracer1111 said: Hopefully the title says it all. Would you put the OS, Page File, and all other programs on a smaller, cheaper (not-top-of-the-line) 1TB SSD like an EVO 970, and dedicate a fast 512GB SSD like a Samsung EVO 980 Pro JUST for DCS and MSFS2020? Or would you not worry about it and put everything on a 2TB SSD like a Sabrent Rocket 4.0 or EVO 980 Pro? The computer will be primarily for gaming. 2TB+ on a single SSD. The reason is that "usually" the M2-1 slot has bus lanes directly to cpu while the M2-2 slot shares PCI lanes. In my case, on my b450 motherboard, the M2-2 slot, when populated, disables all but the GPU's PCI slot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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