I've always had a dual-drive setup for my PC and I'm sticking with that this time. I'm using an ASUS Z960-G motherboard that supports PCIe gen 5 with four M.2 slots. Specifically, I've got two Samsung 990 PRO NVMe drives: one for Windows 11 and applications, and the other for games and multimedia. I have a couple of questions regarding this setup: 1. Is there any performance advantage to installing games on the same drive that has the operating system? 2. If I put my OS drive in the PCIe 5.0 slot, will it still downgrade to PCIe 4.0 since that's the max support for the 990 PRO? I'm not looking to invest in a PCIe gen 5 NVMe drive due to thermal issues and cost concerns. Also, I tend to play demanding titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and other popular FPS and open-world games. Appreciate any insights!
1 Answer
There's really no performance benefit to installing your games on the same drive as your OS. Even if you put your PCIe 4.0 drive in a 5.0 slot, it will still just run at 4.0 speeds. So, it won't affect loading times or anything like that.
Thanks for the clarification! I was also wondering about the performance of partitioned M.2 NVMe Gen4 drives. Would it save resources to just use one larger drive partitioned for both OS and games?