Hi I am kinda confused, so would appreciate some advice.
I just bought 1TB M.2 NVME KC3000 (DRAM) and 1TB 2.5" SATA SSD MX500 (DRAM), and I am unsure how to set them up. Should I put the OS on the NVME and storage/games & game files on the SATA, or vice versa? I am after best possible performance, especially gaming performance (competitive Warzone player).
Thanks for any help.
Okay so install Windows on the NVME. But what about other programs that I install, should I also install them on the NVME C drive? Or install all programs, games, and file storage on the SATA drive?
Thanks!
Productivity apps should always be installed on a faster SSD.
Games, your Steam Library and any other stuff that you don't open or use on a daily basis, can be installed on lower-end storage device.
It's very easy to move stuff between drives without reinstalling, the game launcher will easily find the files once you've pointed it to look in the correct drive directory.
Fantastic, thanks for your help mate.
@essent1al: Just one thing to look out for, next year DirectStorage will start appearing in games. I'll be a slow rollout, but putting a game on an NVME drive instead of a SATA SSD should see decent gains (halving the load time is what Microsoft is saying compared to right now on the same drive).
It's on a game-by-game basis though, and likely the games themselves will highlight it when they come out, so nothing to worry about now. As scrimshaw mentioned about, you can shift them around pretty easily.
Not sure if this helps but Puget systems do a lot of testing of various drive set-ups for productivity apps such as adobe programs (photoshop, premiere pro, after effects etc. When it came to having 1 SATA + 1 NVMe drive I'm pretty sure they suggested a set up of putting windows and the productivity apps on the SATA SSD and putting cache and working files on the faster NVMe drive. The testing didn't show a great deal of improvement in load/boot times by having windows and apps on an NVMe drive vs. SATA but a noticable improvement in performance/render times by having files and cache on the fastest possible drive. Not 100 on whether this translates to gaming but as another user mentioned you'd be set up for the rollout of directstorage this way.
putting cache and working files on the faster NVMe drive
how to do this?
Games at the moment will perform pretty much the same on either NVME or SATA drives (loading times etc). Once games developers start taking advantage of the Windows Direct Storage API (which only just released so I'd say we're likely 3-4+ years away from seeing any results) then you'll start seeing some differences.
So for now - as others have said, put windows and your apps on NVME and don't stress too much where everything else goes.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/directstorage-speeds…
Even with Direct Storage SATA SSD will also benefit from it and the gain isn't that huge.
the faster NVME drive should ideally be where you install Windows. Games can be installed anywhere you wish.