Requisting up-to-date and personal experience regarding having games and OS in the same drive (all in NVMe or split [games on SATA SSD])

[OuterGodHermit]

Hey, I going to build my first mid-range gaming PC and I was wondering, does having the games in my OS drive will have a significant impact on loading times? Maybe due to Windows wanting to use pagfile even though is there enough RAM? I got a SATA SSD and a NVMe. The second one is way faster, so, should I put games and the OS in there? All together or one in each? 

[OuterGodHermit]

I already got my answer on Discord, ow do I delete a post? 

[moeischamp]

4 minutes ago, aleamaro791 said:

I already got my answer on Discord, ow do I delete a post? 

wait before u delete, whats the answer?

[Eigenvektor]

Having your games and OS on an NVMe does make a difference, but not a big one. As soon as the disk if fast enough, it stops being the bottleneck and something else (like CPU for decompression) becomes the limiting factor. This might change once games are written to take advantage of the (much) higher raw transfer speed.

 

Likewise splitting OS and games makes very little real world difference on an NVMe or SATA. With a spinning disk reading from multiple places at once can have a larger impact, due to seek times. So the more programs need to read in parallel from different places, the more sense it might make to split it onto separate HDDs, but a lot less for SATA or NVMe.

 

5 minutes ago, aleamaro791 said:

I already got my answer on Discord, ow do I delete a post? 

You don't. But you could ask the mods to do it for you. Rather than delete it, how about posting the answer so other people with a similar question can profit?

[OuterGodHermit]

4 minutes ago, moeischamp said:

wait before u delete, whats the answer?

It does not affect loading times, I should put both on the fastest (NVMe) but since the quality and speed of SSD really dont have much impact on loading times (LTT and Hardware Unboxed have videos about that) I can place the bigger games on the SATA SSD. Because it is probably bigger (not in my case, both are the same) but to also to don't fill the OS drive. Or just place there games you don't access much. 

[OuterGodHermit]

1 minute ago, Eigenvektor said:

You don't. But you could ask the mods to do it for you. Rather than delete it, how about posting the answer so other people with a similar question can profit?

Did just that. Thanks for the answer!

[Alex Atkin UK]

16 minutes ago, aleamaro791 said:

Or just place there games you don't access much. 

I'd think the opposite makes more sense, put games there you DO play a lot, as you're less likely to uninstall/install them adding wear to the OS drive.  Not that wear is a big problem with gaming as its nothing compared to people doing video editing for example.

Reading from an SSD a lot doesn't impact its wear, writing does.  As long as you have enough RAM that the game doesn't cause paging (which will cause stutter in games even if they're on their own drive), there should be zero difference between having games on the OS drive vs its own.  Once the OS has booted, it shouldn't need to read much from the OS drive, once in a game 99.9% of IO will be game files.