How to optomize multiple SSD

[DrMango]

Hello all! Looking for a bit of an advice

(After long time lurking, finally decided to create an account)

 

So I am planning for new pc build, have new parts as well as scrapped ones. Basically right now I ended up with two 1TB nvme ssds and I'm wondering what is the best way to go about it so I would be making the most of the two. Should I just leave them as two disk partitions and use one to install programs/boot, and another for files/data (would programs installed on drive 1, reading and writing to folders on drive 2 slow things down?) Or perhaps I use disk manager to combine them together? (would that affect their speeds given that they are not of the same make and model?) Or if there are other considerations or better options.

My storage needs basically are media files, VMs, and datasets

 

Thanks!

[mariushm]

Keep them separate, use one for operating system and application, the other one for storage (datasets, games, music, movies etc)

Maybe make two partitions on the boot drive  .. 300-500 GB for OS and applications,  the rest for VMs or whatever...  

Then you can make an image of the boot partition and have it as backup.

[DrMango]

1 minute ago, mariushm said:

Keep them separate, use one for operating system and application, the other one for storage (datasets, games, music, movies etc)

Maybe make two partitions on the boot drive  .. 300-500 GB for OS and applications,  the rest for VMs or whatever...  

Then you can make an image of the boot partition and have it as backup.

Thanks! Makes sense. Noob questions though, would a program on drive 1 writing and reading from its file library on drive 2 technically be slower than if both were on the same drive? even if say the difference is miniscule

[manikyath]

6 minutes ago, DrMango said:

Thanks! Makes sense. Noob questions though, would a program on drive 1 writing and reading from its file library on drive 2 technically be slower than if both were on the same drive? even if say the difference is miniscule

depends on the application.

in theory if a program needs access to files from two drives, it has the combination of bandwidth available, theoretically increasing the read performance.

 

in practisce.. there's stuff like GTA V lagging when the custom radio channel's music is stored on a separate disk.

 

i do expect anything close to an enterprise application (so.. anything not a AAA game made to fit the unwashed masses and rake in cash with minimal effort) will be designed with this option in mind, because it's very common to put datasets on a separate drive, to ensure the dataset growing will never critically impact the software on the box.