M.2 storage confusion

[LovelyChappy]

I plan on building a computer with a 500gb m.2 drive and a 3tb HDD. If I want to take advantage of fast game load times, do I need to install the games on the m.2 drive or can I install them on the HDD and still have the fast loading times that the m.2 drive provides like through the OS or something? I am slightly confused at the process of how it works.

 

Thank you 

[Samfisher]

You only get the speed of whatever is on the SSD.

[Mateyyy]

If a game or whatever is installed on the hard drive, it will load as fast as that hard drive allows, regardless of your boot drive.

[LovelyChappy]

1 minute ago, Samfisher said:

You only get the speed of whatever is on the SSD.

 

1 minute ago, Mateyyy said:

If a game or whatever is installed on the hard drive, it will load as fast as that hard drive allows, regardless of your boot drive.

So how come a lot of people suggest just using the m.2 drive for the operating system and putting their games on a hard drive, is this because they only want a fast windows startup?

[mbntr]

1 minute ago, LovelyChappy said:

I plan on building a computer with a 500gb m.2 drive and a 3tb HDD. If I want to take advantage of fast game load times, do I need to install the games on the m.2 drive or can I install them on the HDD and still have the fast loading times that the m.2 drive provides like through the OS or something? I am slightly confused at the process of how it works.

 

Thank you 

If you have the os installed on the m.2 drive boot times will be low and same for the programs installed on said drive.

Games installed on the HDD will not load as fast, but still faster because the drive is not crippled by the OS.

What you likely meant is similar to Optane (only available on intel platforms) or StoreMI (for AMD), these are caching technologies and are often used to accelerate hard drives

[Drama Lama]

Just now, LovelyChappy said:

 

So how come a lot of people suggest just using the m.2 drive for the operating system and putting their games on a hard drive, is this because they only want a fast windows startup?

Yes 

500 gb are more than enough for Windows so you could even one two of your favorite AAA games on the SSD

[Samfisher]

2 minutes ago, LovelyChappy said:

 

So how come a lot of people suggest just using the m.2 drive for the operating system and putting their games on a hard drive, is this because they only want a fast windows startup?

It's because when not in gaming situations, the speed of everything else you do on the PC will be from the move to a SSD.

[19_blackie_73]

Game loading times arent that much affected by being on a hdd. Some huge open world titles might have a slight benefit, but for that your ssd is to small anyways. The only game thats on my ssd therefore is rdr2, all other games used to live on the ssd but wandered over to the hdd

[Mateyyy]

2 minutes ago, LovelyChappy said:

So how come a lot of people suggest just using the m.2 drive for the operating system and putting their games on a hard drive, is this because they only want a fast windows startup?

Yes, but I'd say a lot of people nowadays just run a single large SSD and run everything off it.

[LovelyChappy]

2 minutes ago, 19_blackie_73 said:

Game loading times arent that much affected by being on a hdd. Some huge open world titles might have a slight benefit, but for that your ssd is to small anyways. The only game thats on my ssd therefore is rdr2, all other games used to live on the ssd but wandered over to the hdd

So if I really wanted fast loading times, I could buy an m.2 for OS HDD for big files and an SATA SSD for the games that I want to load significantly quicker than the HDD?

[-rascal-]

1 minute ago, LovelyChappy said:

So if I really wanted fast loading times, I could buy an m.2 for OS HDD for big files and an SATA SSD for the games that I want to load significantly quicker than the HDD?

 

Or put your OS + games on a single SSD (let it be M.2 / NVMe / SATA), and file storage on a HDD.

File / mass storage on a HDD...because 4TB+ HDDs are cheap compared to a 4TB SSD.

[19_blackie_73]

30 minutes ago, LovelyChappy said:

So if I really wanted fast loading times, I could buy an m.2 for OS HDD for big files and an SATA SSD for the games that I want to load significantly quicker than the HDD?

Yeah would be one option, or get a 1TB M.2

500gb fills up very quickly with todays game sizes

[RejZoR]

You can use your 500GB SSD to accelerate your 3TB HDD. You need PrimoCache app. Not free, but is around 30€/$ lifetime license and you can trial it for 30 days to see if this is what you want or like.

 

It works in a way that SSD becomes a cache drive that stores most commonly accessed stuff from HDD because it's fast for access. It does all this automatically so you don't have to move things around. All the games and Windows get installed on HDD. SSD is entirely controlled by PrimoCache afterwards. Your usable capacity is then 3GB on the HDD and you also install and use everything from HDD. It's a cool way of having really big and cheap capacity with near SSD speeds across the board. Writes however are always done on HDD directly and will be slower. SSD can be used for write cache too, but I wouldn't recommend it. It's reads that matter most for performance, not writes.

 

It's worth checking it out as it works really well.