How many SSDs?

Ergroilnin · April 21, 2018

So the time for cheap SSD has been upon us for quite some time.

And I have been using 256gb SSD for booting and main apps + games along with another 1 and 2 tb disks for media but I have been getting annoyed by using normal HDDs for the loudness and thus I have been thinking about getting 2tb SSD since the pricing is not nearly as bad as it used to be for gb/buck. The thing is, is there any serious reason to use more than one disc for everything? Such as using the old kingston ssd purely as boot drive and the 2tb ssd for everything else or is there no point as long as there isnt any storage problem?

Crunchy Dragon · April 21, 2018

I personally would like to have multiple drives: one for booting and other things I need to load quickly, and another drive for mass storage.

Oshino Shinobu · April 21, 2018

Sectioning out data across multiple drives does have its advantages. One of the main ones is to have an SSD that is dedicated to the OS alone, so that if you ever need to reinstall the OS, upgrade the OS or really change anything to do with the OS, you don't have to worry about the rest of your data and programs.

Spreading data across drives can help reduce the chances of losing all your data, while increasing the chances of losing some of it (more drives means more chances for one to fail). If you have an effective backup solution, spreading the data across multiple drives means that when a drive does die, you only need to restore one drive worth, rather than all of it. It also reduces the financial impact of losing a drive as you don't get a big hit all at once like you would if a large drive failed.

Lady Fitzgerald · April 22, 2018

I prefer to have my OS and programs on their own SSD and my data on another SSD (or multiple SSDs if one SSD cannot hold all my data, such as on my desktop). It simplifies backups and restores. However, separate SSDs aren't always an option, such as in notebooks and laptops that have room for only drive. Then, partitioning is the way to go.

thedangerine · April 22, 2018

There is a video actually I believe on Techquickie on why larger ssds are faster. In a nut shell an ssd stripes your data across all the flash chips so a larger ssd with more flash chips is actually slightly faster, also larger drives are typically cheaper to buy one of instead of two smaller ones, this isn't always the case so for sure check but a bigger one is typically better.