How should I configure my SSDs?

[Billy Cao]

I'm building a system mainly for video editing mainly using Adobe suit and Davinci Resolve, and photo editing using Lightroom. I bought two SSDs, one is 500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus, another is 1TB ADATA GAMMIX S11 Lite (dont worry if you cant find this model on Google - will explain that below)

 

My current plan is to install the OS and softwares onto the 970, and dump video files and photos onto the S11 Lite. However I read that the media scratch disks for the cache of preview files should be on the fastest drive that the OS is not installed onto. I am in a dilemma now on deciding which drive should I use for scratch disk and installation of OS and softwares? Does it really matter for scratch disk to be the same drive as the OS and software drive?

 

And another related question, I know that the sequential read/write speed is not very meanful to daily usage snappiness and responsiveness, but which benchmark result should I be looking that actually matters? Is it 4K read speed or IOPS or what?

Thank you

 

Regarding the 1TB ADATA GAMMIX S11 Lite, it is aprantly a China only model that's why you cant find it on ADATA's offical english website, but it is indeed on its Chinese website so its definitely a legit model. The website stats are:

3D TLC with SLC cache

PCIe Gen 3 X4

Read: 2000MB/s

Write: 1600MB/s

4K IOPS Read/Write: 188K/156K

5 year warranty or 600TBW

 

In case you need, my motherboard is MSI B550M Mortar, it has two M.2 SSD slots with one of them being gen 4. CPU is 3700x, gpu is rtx 2060 super.

[mockedarche]

What res and bitrate are you recording/working with? Honestly I would still use the 1tb just for dumps. The difference between the two will be less noticeable and honestly if you're using large files than you would need the space. The difference from sata to pcie and m.2 is there but the difference from m.2 to m.2 is not really there. As I said I would just go ahead and use the larger drive that's plenty fast for the footage and dumps.

[Billy Cao]

5 hours ago, Ohsnaps said:

What res and bitrate are you recording/working with? Honestly I would still use the 1tb just for dumps. The difference between the two will be less noticeable and honestly if you're using large files than you would need the space. The difference from sata to pcie and m.2 is there but the difference from m.2 to m.2 is not really there. As I said I would just go ahead and use the larger drive that's plenty fast for the footage and dumps.

Im looking at 4K 100Mbps H265 footages, that's probably the most demanding ones. Besides, I plan to use After Effects for simple motion graphics for a youtube channel intro.

How will you say about the impact of installing the OS onto the slower 1TB driver instead? Does the extra speed that 970 provides matter for OS?