Should I use the slower NVMe drive for the OS or put everything on the faster one?
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MellowPine7!
I'm putting together a new PC and currently have two NVMe SSDs available: a 1TB Kingston A2000 PCIe 3.0 drive and a 4TB Kingston Renegade PCIe 4.0 drive. My Asus TUF B550M-Plus 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 slower 1TB drive and use the 4TB drive for games and general storage, or would the OS run 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 tasks and gaming.
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Put the operating system and everything else on the 4TB drive if you want the simplest setup, and sell or repurpose the 1TB drive. A separate OS drive won’t make the computer noticeably faster, and a partition on the larger drive would mostly be an organizational choice. Just leave enough free space and keep important data backed up.
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The practical difference will be tiny. PCIe 4.0 is much faster for large sequential transfers, but booting, launching programs, and everyday desktop use usually don’t benefit enough to be noticeable. You can put the OS on the 1TB drive and games and data on the 4TB drive, or install everything on the larger drive if you prefer simpler organization.
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Since both drives have DRAM, either one should feel responsive. Random performance, sustained speeds, and available free space matter more for normal use than the PCIe generation. I’d personally use the 1TB A2000 for the OS and applications and reserve the 4TB drive for games and storage, mostly for organizational reasons.
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The only situation where drive speed can become very noticeable is when the system runs out of memory and starts swapping heavily. In that case, a faster SSD helps, but adding more RAM is the better solution. For regular gaming and desktop use, both of these drives should perform well.
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MellowPine7!: That makes sense. I’ve used separate drives for the OS and games before, so I may keep that arrangement. I’m also careful to maintain backups in case either SSD fails.