One drive or more?

[Ergroilnin]

Hello,

 

so I am almost set on using only one SSD in my new build but before I go all out on this, I want to clarify something.

 

I will be honest, even with the most quiet of HDDs I can still occasionally hear them spin and click when under heavy load, which is truly annoying to me, that and the speed of them is basically what got me into thinking about single SSD at all.

 

I have read some posts and articles saying that having two discs is superior to one, with no proper explanation why and no proper comparison about one vs two and more. I mean, I know that if I run both OS and everything else out of one disc, obviously the OS is always taking a bit of the read and write speeds for itself, thus the speeds for the rest of the applications will be cut down by that. But is having two discs, one dedicated to OS, one to everything else going to really matter? As far as I would guess, there is also some latency etc. for "talking" between more physical units to be accounted as well.

 

To also clarify something, I am only considering this on standard SATA3 SSDs, no NVMe. And I do have one SSD from my old rig, that could serve as the purely OS disc, so other than cable management and some minor heat, there would be no downside added for having 1 vs 2 SSDs in my new rig.

 

Also before anyone mentions this, I find 1TB SSDs extremely affordable and for stuff like long term backup of both the Windows bit copy, photos and all the important data, I still will be occasionally manually backing them up on external 2TB HDD that I already have.

[Mira Yurizaki]

There's no advantage to having one disk or two disks for performance reasons . The only advantage I can see is if you need to reinstall the OS, you don't have to offload your data somewhere to prevent it from getting wiped. But since you have a backup drive and you can create a separate partition anyway, that's sort of a moot advantage.