SSD Drive type

[ND_Viper69]

Need some opinions on the following.  

 

Building a system and looking at my storage drive plans.  Was getting a motherboard with a single M.2 slot, an M.2 SSD obviously within reasonable price (500GB looks reasonable right now).  Was debating whether to get a moboard with two M.2 slots and have 1 64-128GB drive for OS and everyday needs software to boot from and the second for my games and installed software.  The question is... is it worth having two M.2 slots for this setup or better to have a traditional SATA SSD and one M.2 drive for speed?  If a mix of the two is your choice... would you have the M.2 for the OS or for the games and software to get performance?

[xentropa]

I am not sure but usually isn't only one of the M.2 slots PCIe, while the other one is SATA?

[Jurrunio]

Some M.2 SSDs still use the slower SATA, not the faster NVMe mind you.

 

NVMe SSDs arent noticeably faster as a boot drive. It's major advantage is when you move huge files around, like putting videos into editing software for example. If you dont do that, just a large capacity SATA SSD (2.5" ones are usually cheaper) is good enough.

[brob]

10 minutes ago, ND_Viper69 said:

Need some opinions on the following.  

 

Building a system and looking at my storage drive plans.  Was getting a motherboard with a single M.2 slot, an M.2 SSD obviously within reasonable price (500GB looks reasonable right now).  Was debating whether to get a moboard with two M.2 slots and have 1 64-128GB drive for OS and everyday needs software to boot from and the second for my games and installed software.  The question is... is it worth having two M.2 slots for this setup or better to have a traditional SATA SSD and one M.2 drive for speed?  If a mix of the two is your choice... would you have the M.2 for the OS or for the games and software to get performance?

M.2 drives currently have two popular flavors, SATA III and NVME. The later being the much faster protocol. There is no significant performance difference between an M.2 SATA III drive and its 2.5" counterpart. Personally I prefer to leave M.2 slots open for NVMe drives.

 

128GB is not enough for a system drive.

 

There is no real need to have multiple smaller ssd. A single larger one has better wear leveling, (which should mean longer life),  and for general use there is no significant performance difference.

[SupaKomputa]

M.2 have 2 types, the sata and nvme one.

M.2 sata is just regular sata going through m.2 slot.

The speed is only as good as the best sata drive.

the nvme one is what you're looking for.

For me having 2 ssd is not cost effective.

for gaming i just install all my games in a big hdd, games uses too much space (50gb / game).

loading from hdd is not that different from ssd for me.

so the best combo for me is 1 ssd + a big (multiple) hdd.