I'm putting together a new PC and have two NVMe SSDs available: a 1TB Kingston A2000 PCIe 3.0 drive and a 4TB Kingston Renegade PCIe 4.0 drive. The motherboard has one PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot and one PCIe 3.0 x4 slot. Should I install the operating system on the smaller PCIe 3.0 drive and use the 4TB drive for games and data, or would the OS and everyday applications be noticeably faster if everything were installed on the PCIe 4.0 drive? Both drives have DRAM caches, and this system will mainly be used for normal desktop work and gaming.
3 Answers
Using the 1TB PCIe 3.0 drive for the OS and applications and the 4TB PCIe 4.0 drive for games and data is perfectly reasonable. It can make reinstalls or drive management more convenient, but it is not inherently faster. Just make sure the faster drive has enough free space, since SSD performance can drop when it is nearly full.
The practical difference will be tiny for booting, launching programs, and gaming. PCIe 4.0 is much faster on paper, but those workloads usually involve relatively small random accesses rather than long sequential transfers. You could put everything on the 4TB drive and sell the 1TB drive, or keep both for organizational reasons—neither choice will make a noticeable difference in normal use.
Put workloads that actually benefit from high sequential throughput on the faster drive, such as large file transfers or some content-creation tasks. Windows itself will not suddenly feel much faster on the PCIe 4.0 SSD. The exception would be heavy paging when you run out of RAM, although frequent swapping is better solved by adding memory if possible.
That makes sense. Fortunately, both of these drives have DRAM, so I’ll mainly choose based on how I want to organize the system rather than expecting a major speed difference.