Storage Configuration for Gaming?

[LordHiler]

At present I have a 500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus as my boot drive in the first NVMe slot on an Aorus Elite AX B550. I have a Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM HDD for local storage, and a 6TB (after raid overhead) 4x2TB synology NAS that can pretty reliably saturate my gigabit home network. 

 

For gaming, I'm looking at putting in a new gpu and a 5000 series Ryzen in the next few months, and that also has me looking at my storage. 

 

At the moment the few games I play are on the HDD (that's where my steam cache is for instance). Should I move that to the 500GB NVMe? A bigger PCIe 3.0 NVMe? Should I be looking at a PCIe 4.0 NVMe? Does that even matter at this point? 

 

My Mobo only supports PCIe-4 on the first slot so I would either need to boot from the second slot which I suppose I could - it's through the chipset but in practice I doubt that matters, or I would need widows and games on the same SSD. 

 

I know essentially nothing about optimizing anything for gaming. So I appreciate thoughts!

[thedangerine]

Honestly when it comes to games loading off an ssd will be a lot faster, but what kind of SSD you are on doesn't matter too much. I have played games off NVMe and sata ssd's and can't tell the difference at all in load times, if anything it would probably be a few seconds at most. I used to buy sata ssd's a lot because they were cheaper and all I really wanted was decent load times and a reliable drive, now I lean more towards NVMe now that cost are going down plus no cables is always nice too

[Dedayog]

I would put all your games on a 1 or 2TB SSD.  NVMe or SATA doesn't matter really for now (real world gaming speeds are negligible).  Realistically, unless you're a hoarder you don't need more than 2TB for all the games you actually play in a 3-6 month cycle, and with as fast as internet is these days, you can always re-download anything you want to get back into.

 

I mean nothing wrong with how you have it now, but if you want a bit faster load times then I'd get them all on SSD.

[LordHiler]

That's awesome! Thank you. 

 

Pardon my incredible ignorance but if I delete games and then redownload them from Steam I assume I lose my save data?

[Mark Kaine]

15 minutes ago, LordHiler said:

That's awesome! Thank you. 

 

Pardon my incredible ignorance but if I delete games and then redownload them from Steam I assume I lose my save data?

In some games that can actually happen (if the devs are lazy and put the save folder in the same location as the main game files) usually its stored outside that, and you can also upload your saves to the Steam cloud™®© free of charge ™

 

I'd definitely recommend to make local backups too if you care at all about your saves because as always cloud saves can be messy, tho that's up to you. 

[IkeaGnome]

13 minutes ago, LordHiler said:

That's awesome! Thank you. 

 

Pardon my incredible ignorance but if I delete games and then redownload them from Steam I assume I lose my save data?

Depends on the game. If it has cloud saves, you're good. But as always you're better off making a backup for save games anyways.

[LordHiler]

Thanks everyone! Very helpful!