Morning fellas,
I’m having a dilemma that is going to need to be resolved. The old box is getting a new M.2 1Tb SSD. In retrospect, I should have gotten something smaller. My question is do people still separate the games from C drive. I am doing this right now. C drive I only have windows, antivirus ect. My games are on a separate drive. Can I put some of my sims on C or should I still separate them?
I have DCS on my W10 drive. Everything else stays on my other drive. Not a huge reason for it, but I figure it spreads the read/write load out on my SSDs.
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How is performance? Would you like to share your specs?
I actually have a 1TB nvme ssd for windows and productivity apps, and a (slower) 1TB SATA SSD for game installs. Works well for me!
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I still split. 500GB NVMe for Windows and another of the same for DCS.
DCS may need more space as new maps come out.
Biggest win for the no games on C: is that when you reinstall windows or rebuild you don’t have to wipe out the game install, you can carry it over with the secondary disk to the new installation or build. If the total download time for DCS from scratch would be a pain for you, don’t install on C:.
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I have windows and some other stuff on a 500gb ssd on C, and the flight-sims on a 1tb name drive.
My C drive is an 1 Tb M. 2 nvme with W10 and DCS, my 970 1Tb Evo sata drive has most games and I have all my photos on a 1TB mechanical HDD. Good point about windows having its own disk if its possible but its easy enough to drag DCS across to an other directory until you format/reinstall
Thank You all. I have a 1TB M. 2 970 Evo plus. Guess I will put Win 10 and DCS on it. Then I will have 2 other SSDs for IL2 GB and all my other games.
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If that is your only concern, DCS installs are very portable. I’ve recently reinstalled both OSs on my machine due to upgrading the hardware and moving DCS over was no bother at all (apart from the saved games folder, had a few hickups there but that has to lie on C either way).
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I have 3 drives and games all over the place.
With all SSD drives it takes only a minute to copy a game from A to B, so I shuffle around to have my most played and most needy games on the fastest drive.
970 evo plus 512 GB as C
970 evo 1 TB as D
860 evo 1 TB as E
A NAS for backup and Pictures/Videos
I always left my C drive (or partition when I had one HDD in my PC before) for the system. All games and other stuff was on different drives/partitions. Few years back I suffered from stuttering on DCS (SATA3 SSD for system and HDD for games/data) atfer I upgraded with 1TB fast NVMe drive which now stores DCS with few other high storage titles (FS2020) my stuttering problems are gone.
Sorry I was in the driveway tearing my trucks engine apart all day today (hopefully it will all fit back together tomorrow).
17.3" MSI GP75, I7-10750, 32gb 32000 DDR4, RTX 2070, an NVME 2TB (system drive) and 2TB SSD.
I haven’t ever bench marked my machine for the HD’s, but I certainly have never had any issues with stuttering or loading times being unreasonable.
I seperated mine when I built my new PC earlier this year. But that was because I went with a
Crucial P1 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive as my win 10 drive.
Then I got a Crucial MX500 2 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive as my gaming/storage drive
My reasoning was basically have one NVME drive as my operating system and keep the other SSD as storage, Thus maybe, hopefully allowing both to run faster. Also if one fails, I can either still boot or I still have all my files. My PC before this had 2 hard drives in Raid config so I was kinda screwed it one failed.
I am looking to add a second NVME drive for storage though, Crucial P1 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive
AFAIC, your OS drive is the heart of your system. Keep it as clean and efficient as possible. I think 500GB is the perfect size and keep another 500GB SSD for cloning it to ensure survivability. I only keep the OS and some caches on my C: drive, like the windows pagefile and the two 65GB MSFS2020 caches. It’s about 50% capacity at this point.
I use the main drive to like 65-75% capacity I think. That includes games. I don’t push it past that.
It’s 1tb though. I’m not interested in having an extra drive because I refused to use my c for things.
I forgot to mention I’m talking about an M.2 OS drive but that’s cool. Just have an extra 1TB SSD for easy cloning but expect longer cloning times is all I’m sayin’. 
So, I had forgotten my Mobo supports two M. 2 drives. Since I just got the 1Tb, it will go in slot 2. Then Slot one will get my 500Gb for Win10. Only problem is I will probably end up reinstalling DCS. That leaves an unused 256Gb M. 2. I am happy to reinstall Win 10 since my donkey butt machine will not update. Today the Maintenance Techs let me borrow the Air compressor so I will be on the balcony tonight blowing out the two computers and especially my Video Cards. I have a very clean apartment but this is the Desert. I plan on huge clouds of dust coming out of them there boxes. My Win 10 stick will be here soon then I will be able to move the drives. Yay!
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My stick is here but I also ordered an adaptor for the 1Tb M. 2. I will keep my C drive on the 256 GB M.2. I will keep the 500GB M.2 in the no.2 slot and put the 1TB M.2 on the adaptor and a PCIE slot. Does that sound good?
The compressor was a disaster. It was 110v and my apartment is 220v. I finally got a converter big enough to support it. I will need to take the PC outside again. Here comes the weekend!
Hi Maico, how many PCIe lanes do you have available on your Motherboard, you will need most for your GPU… Most motherboards have only 24 so if your 3 m.2 drives take up 12 slots you only have 12 pcielanes for your GPU which means it will probally run @ 8x, which I have heard is fast enough but I am unsure about the faqcts on that.
I also wanted to ask what real benefit would putting your games on a 2nd SSD really benefit considering the speeds of these drives?
What about if you get a worm could it live on the 2nd drive with your games and if you reinstalled just windows on the 1st drive would it be compleltely eradicated?
If I did put the games on a 2nd drive what would I do after I reinstalled windows, how would the games get repaired with windows10?
Not entirely correct. The CPU provides the first 16 for the GPU.
The chipset provides more. Z390 chipsets can offer 24 high speed I/O lanes, which can be PCIE, SATA, USB etc. Some board will support further if one slot is using SATA mode (which is slower and requires a SATA controlled NVMe drive) by disabling a regular SATA port or two. Different motherboard do this differently so you need to read your specific motherboard manual very carefully. He may have the option of using a PCIe card lower down for a third drive, and it may only get two PCIe lanes, or even one - thereby severely limiting it’s speed. (The onboard NVMe slots typically use 4 lanes.)
The speeds quoted by all drive makers are maximum throughput, which you will likely not reach due to overhead of the system. Also, these speeds are typically only possible when moving very large files like video. File transfer is magnitudes slower with dozens or more small files. This is where multi-drive systems can win, you can separate the data streams entirely so that other programs or Windows accessing dozens of small files during normal operations has zero affect on your games loading. While NVMe means that the “contamination” effect is much smaller, it still exists when you try to jam more through one pipe.
As for the large vs. small file speeds, an analogy would be what can get through a long tunnel faster - a high speed train, or hundreds of motorists at rush hour?
Any infection that persists on a secondary drive could re-contaminate the new system. However, since this would typically be some executable code - you would have to run it, or get infected again in the same way so it gets re-activated (which basically requires you laying everything out exactly the same, which if you just got infected and lost your system, you have things you should have changed.)
This depends on the game and it’s installation method. Old installs via CD would usually just overwrite the old data when pointed to the old folder so it wouldn’t help too much.
With smarter installers like those of Steam or DCS itself, they scan for existing files before starting the download so they can save as much time as you can save files for them. Once they revalidate all the files are intact they proceed to setup the rest of the installation such as registry keys and saved games folders. This will drastically reduce your rebuild time as you only have to really do Windows and any programs stuck on C.
The same can be said for storing your personal files on another disk as well.
This is why almost any type of workstation always keeps the work material on different drives, like in video editing. Same goes for severs - if I have a file server that needs to be replaced, I disconnect the data drives, shut it down, start the new server and reconnect the data and setup the file shares rather than spend hours and hours transferring all the files - although in server terms this is all done virtually for the most part these days.