I've heard it's best to keep the operating system and games on separate drives, mainly for recovery reasons. However, I want to use a Gen 5 M.2 SSD for both my OS and games, but I only have one M.2 slot available on my motherboard. Will this arrangement affect performance, or can I just get a large enough storage drive and put everything on it?
4 Answers
In most cases, it won't impact your performance at all. The only time you might see a slowdown is if you're doing something heavy, like installing Windows updates while trying to play a game, but that's pretty rare. Overall, a single fast NVMe SSD is more than capable of handling both.
Nope, putting your OS and games on the same drive is totally fine! Modern NVMe drives are fast enough that you won't notice any performance hit. In fact, my games run perfectly well on the same SSD as my OS, and I've been using a Gen 5 drive without any issues. Just make sure your SSD has enough storage for everything you're planning to install.
Storing both on a single Gen 5 drive is actually a good idea since you won't see any significant difference in performance across different generations of SSDs for gaming. I used to run my OS and game library on a decent SATA SSD, and it was still great! If your budget allows, go for a Gen 4 SSD with DRAM—it'll handle your day-to-day tasks smoothly.
Honestly, the days of worrying about this are long gone! SSDs, especially NVMe drives, are so fast now that it just doesn’t matter—both your OS and games will run just fine on the same drive.
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