M2 Drive Capacity

[C3PO]

I know it was always better to have the OS on a separate drive, but is that needed now tyat we have super fast M2 drives etc ...? Thinking  of one 8TB M2 drive at 7,000 by 7,000 instead of my two slightly slower ones. Any problems with just the one drive approach?

[Hiob]

Apart from the "single point of failure" problem (given, controller defects or problems at all are seldom), no. I don't think it will impact performance in any meaningful way. Not with modern random access speeds.

[speed-of-heat]

the only thing i can think of that it will be less efficient in some scenarios, so when page file is being used at the same time as game disk i/o or operating system functions etc... that said with that sort of M2 drive, would you notice the difference ... i assume not. from a cost perspective though you might be better going with multiple separate drives (though just glancing at the prices that seems to be very brand dependent) 

other than that the only other thing i can think of is any game in which rebar is actually used... but thats a theoretical in the context of DCS 

[Despayre]

1 hour ago, Hiob said:

Apart from the "single point of failure" problem (given, controller defects or problems at all are seldom), no. I don't think it will impact performance in any meaningful way. Not with modern random access speeds.

I'll buy that.

And the day my OS drive fails, I'm gonna be pretty annoyed... if I realize that I have to reset about 1500 DCS bindings across a dozen aircraft (not to mention any mods or add-ons), taking several hours on top of that, now I'm pissed. So, a little more money, or a lot more frustration and save some money. I think those are the options.

[SharpeXB]

2 hours ago, Despayre said:

I realize that I have to reset about 1500 DCS bindings across a dozen aircraft

This is actually not so hard to do. Only takes a few minutes to paste in a new controller ID. You don’t need to manually redo every one.

I think on any future build or major update I would just put in one giant NVMe drive. Just seems efficient. 

Edited March 3 by SharpeXB

[Nightdare]

19 hours ago, Despayre said:

I'll buy that.

And the day my OS drive fails, I'm gonna be pretty annoyed... if I realize that I have to reset about 1500 DCS bindings across a dozen aircraft (not to mention any mods or add-ons), taking several hours on top of that, now I'm pissed. So, a little more money, or a lot more frustration and save some money. I think those are the options.

 

Send the files to your own email

 

Either way, having a second drive is never a bad thing

[speed-of-heat]

Also just having two drives doesn't mitigate against the failure of one of them unless you are mirroring them... 

[MAXsenna]

20 hours ago, Despayre said:

if I realize that I have to reset about 1500 DCS bindings across a dozen aircraft (not to mention any mods or add-ons), taking several hours on top of that

Just back up your DCS settings, you can even have your Saved Games on Onedrive or whatever. And like @SharpeXB wrote. 

 

18 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

This is actually not so hard to do. Only takes a few minutes to paste in a new controller ID. You don’t need to manually redo every one.

You can even do this with a few clicks with software for all the new GUIDs in the new files. If you have lots of modules and peripherals, this will be much more efficient than pasting the new one in every file.

Cheers! 

[H60MTI]

I have multiple drives. My OS(C drive) is on one NVMe drive. My games, DCS and Ghost Recon: Breakpoint are on another 1TB NVMe drive. I also have 2 other 1TB SSD's. One stores copies of my mods for both of those games just so I don't have to go find them online again if I need to reinstall any of those mods. Multiple drives are always a good thing. If everything is on one drive and that one fails, you just SOL. 

[speed-of-heat]

5 hours ago, H60MTI said:

I have multiple drives. My OS(C drive) is on one NVMe drive. My games, DCS and Ghost Recon: Breakpoint are on another 1TB NVMe drive. I also have 2 other 1TB SSD's. One stores copies of my mods for both of those games just so I don't have to go find them online again if I need to reinstall any of those mods. Multiple drives are always a good thing. If everything is on one drive and that one fails, you just SOL. 

This is a fallacy, in your current scenario you have multiple single points of failure. If any one drive fails you are SOL for the data on that drive... You face the same probability of failure for your O/S and game drives as you have if you have a single drive... 

[SharpeXB]

Well having a cloud backup eliminates the concern over drive failures. That’s a really vital feature for any system IMO. 

[speed-of-heat]

24 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

Well having a cloud backup eliminates the concern over drive failures. That’s a really vital feature for any system IMO. 

agreed, i configure all of my planes through joypro,and that is stored in my docs folder which automatically gets backed up into the cloud

[BitMaster]

Cloud Backup can save your day, happened to me last week...LoL    took 2h on Gbit to Restore "C" from the night before...what a blessing.

What I would not do, for no game, is place it's settings folder on a OneDrive mirrored folder. That is bound to cause problems down the road imho.

 

The biggest benefit from my perspective of 1 drive vs 2 drives is foremost the direct attachment to the CPU with 4 PCIe lanes and not routed through your Southbridge.

If that actually shows some beneficial effect in DCS.... who knows ..=?!

 

 

[Dragon1-1]

On 3/6/2025 at 7:54 AM, speed-of-heat said:

This is a fallacy, in your current scenario you have multiple single points of failure. If any one drive fails you are SOL for the data on that drive... You face the same probability of failure for your O/S and game drives as you have if you have a single drive... 

It's not a fallacy when you consider that for an SSD, the probability of failure is proportional to how often the drive is being written to. Game files are updated much less often than ones on the OS drive would be (which is usually chock full of temporary stuff), meaning that having other data on different drives does reduce the likelihood of a total loss. In theory, a larger SSD should take more writes, but in practice, this isn't always true.

If one of those spares is bootable, you have actual redundancy, in that you can recover, with most of your data intact, from losing your primary OS drive.

[EightyDuce]

On 3/3/2025 at 8:17 AM, C3PO said:

I know it was always better to have the OS on a separate drive, but is that needed now tyat we have super fast M2 drives etc ...? Thinking  of one 8TB M2 drive at 7,000 by 7,000 instead of my two slightly slower ones. Any problems with just the one drive approach?

This is 100% anecdotal, but I went from a system M.2 and two other M.2s for programs including DCS to a single PCIE5 4Tb for OS+DCS and an additional 2Tb PCIE4 M.2. 

The on difference I noticed is slightly decreased load time.