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Is it better to have windows on a separate drive than games?

maizenblue

I currently have windows installed on a 256gb sata drive and my games on a 1tb m.2. I'm reinstalling windows because of microsutter and lag issues in COD warzone and im wondering if I should put everything on the 1tb m.2 or keep it the same way it is?

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I'm talking strictly from the point of view of games running smoothly. I was just spitballing over my warzone stuttering being related to having windows on a separate and slower drive.

 

CPU: Ryzen 7 3700x,  MOBO: ASUS TUF X570 Gaming Pro wifi, CPU cooler: Noctua U12a RAM: Gskill Ripjaws V @3600mhz,  GPU: Asus Tuf RTX OC 3080 PSU: Seasonic Focus GX850 CASE: Lian Li Lancool 2 Mesh Storage: 500 GB Inland Premium M.2,  Sandisk Ultra Plus II 256 GB & 120 GB

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7 minutes ago, maizenblue said:

I'm talking strictly from the point of view of games running smoothly. I was just spitballing over my warzone stuttering being related to having windows on a separate and slower drive.

 

I think you're looking in the wrong place. There will be no impact having games and the OS on separate drives. Now, the drive the games are installed on alone could play a roll in the performance so you may want to look at that but again, just the separation between the games and the OS is completely unrelated. 

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16 minutes ago, maizenblue said:

I'm talking strictly from the point of view of games running smoothly. I was just spitballing over my warzone stuttering being related to having windows on a separate and slower drive.

 

absolutely no difference

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There are some games that don't like being in the "Program Files" folders on the C: drive...

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It'd be better if you ran in different drives or ssds.  Windows runs a lot of background processes which will keep your drive or ssd utilized for most of the time. So when a power hungry application runs it can only utilized the drive or ssd with half of it being used by windows.

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10 hours ago, maizenblue said:

I'm talking strictly from the point of view of games running smoothly. I was just spitballing over my warzone stuttering being related to having windows on a separate and slower drive.

 

Nope. Actually in my situation I do the reverse, all my games are run from a HD, regular spinning disk, OS on SSD.

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On 9/1/2021 at 9:39 PM, Gamer4714 said:

It'd be better if you ran in different drives or ssds.  Windows runs a lot of background processes which will keep your drive or ssd utilized for most of the time. So when a power hungry application runs it can only utilized the drive or ssd with half of it being used by windows.

That is not how it works.

 

Those processes are mostly running in memory. They are loaded into RAM when they start and the disk is accessed if a read/write is necessary.

 

How much RAM is available to the system would have a way bigger impact.

 

In the old days with smaller amounts of RAM (1GB or less), yes there would be a lot of reading and writing to and from the page file (virtual memory).

 

These days with 8GB+ in most gaming PCs that shouldn't be an issue. And the OS is going to be running those things regardless of which drive what app is on.

 

SSDs are very fast compared to spinning, mechanical disks, which have latency due to seek times as the heads take time to physically move across the spinning platters. SSD and Nvme eliminate this.

 

 

 

 

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10 hours ago, aramini said:

That is not how it works.

 

Those processes are mostly running in memory. They are loaded into RAM when they start and the disk is accessed if a read/write is necessary.

 

How much RAM is available to the system would have a way bigger impact.

 

In the old days with smaller amounts of RAM (1GB or less), yes there would be a lot of reading and writing to and from the page file (virtual memory).

 

You find new games still use a lot of RAM sometime more them 8GB, so page file is still use a lot. The key to lower the slow-down is to keep the page file (virtual memory) on the fast drive, it does not have to be the same one as the OS, (e.g. OS on HDD, game and page file on SSD). I like the OS to be fast so keep the OS with page files on the fast drive, then the games on slower. (game may load slow but one loaded there no problems).  

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1 hour ago, A51UK said:

You find new games still use a lot of RAM sometime more them 8GB, so page file is still use a lot. The key to lower the slow-down is to keep the page file (virtual memory) on the fast drive, it does not have to be the same one as the OS, (e.g. OS on HDD, game and page file on SSD). I like the OS to be fast so keep the OS with page files on the fast drive, then the games on slower. (game may load slow but one loaded there no problems).

Yes, I understand and agree.

 

My point was that all of those Windows processes unrelated  to the game are loaded in RAM and will be idle for the most part if they have no work to do.

 

You could always disable non-essential service and startup processes (Sysinternals AutoRuns is useful here) to free up RAM.

 

If you find that there is a lot of a paging occurring, you'd get more performance benefit by adding more RAM, as constantly paging is a sign of the system being RAM starved.

 

That's why games and software give minimum system requirements and recommended system requirements.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 9/1/2021 at 7:21 PM, OhioYJ said:

Better? Meh, I guess that depends. I keep my Steam library on a separate drive. That has the advantage of being able to be moved to a new computer or survive a fresh install without issue. So sometimes being on a different drive can have advantages.

Same..I keep my Steam Games on one SSD drive, my microsoft games and others on another drive and my OS on my main m.2 drive..LOL

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