I currently have a Samsung 960 EVO (250GB) M.2-2280 PCI Express 3.0 as my C drive but think that I might prefer something bigger to put games on as one or two do not seem to play nice on another SSD. Should I get a larger capacity M.2 or use a large capacity SSD?
Personally, I'd swap to a large SATA M.2 SSD. The real world difference for booting and loading programmes compared to NVMe is negligible and its much cheaper. Plus, no wires!
Do you have a spare M.2 slot on your motherboard? If not, I'd probably just get a 2.5" SATA SSD for your games. To be honest, I'd probably just get a 2.5" SATA SSD anyway as you'll not see any improvement in loading times between a PCI-E M.2 SSD and a SATA one, in my experience. I'd keep the 960 EVO as your OS drive, though, as they are great drives, and just add another SSD for additional storage for games. The only reason I could see for swapping one M.2 drive for another is if you absolutely, definitely have to minimise cable clutter in your case.
I already have games on another SSD in fact I only use SSD's these days except for my external back up. It may well be the game itself as the latest patch has caused more issues than it resolved which is the Ubisoft way. I was hoping that by having games an OS on one drive might be of benefit, but if not then I might as well leave it. I am thinking that a new build once the next gen Nvidia cards arrive might be possible so could well use a bigger drive in that?
I've never found a game that loads faster with an SSD over my Toshiba P300 2TB HDD. Stick with windows on an SSD and get a high performance, large capacity HDD for your games, and software.
I can't see any reason why keeping your OS and games on a single drive would help, to be honest. I much prefer to have my OS on a separate partition from my games and data because that makes reinstalling the OS so much easier should something catastrophic occur. As for loading times between an SSD and mechanical hard drive, it varies between titles IME. For some, there's definitely a noticeable improvement in loading times with an SSD but for others you'll not see the difference.
OK folks I will leave things as they are for now and decide what route to go once the new GPU's are out. Thanks all.
Also use a toshiba p300 but mines the 3TB. Great drives, fast and really quiet. I also never notice a difference in loading times vs my Samsung 960 evo nvme ssd.
Yeah, the drives are great! Fast and reliable. Reminds me of the Samsung F1 drives from back in the day.
Yeah, the Beth games were the ones that I was thinking of in terms of an SSD making a tangible difference.
It's massive. It's the worst when you are coming from a building into a built up area. On my non SSD game drive I can go to the kitchen, make a drink and come back and it is still loading ffs. What's *super* annoying is that if you accidentally go back into the building it starts all over a bloody gain !! Doom is a sod too.
Even the likes of Oblivion was bad for it. I remember the first time I installed Oblivion on an SSD and I didn't even have time to read the loading screen tip before it was ready. Previously I had time to read two or three of the different messages
It probably made a difference to Fallout 3, too. I guess it's because it has to load the entire area you are in into VRAM. I watch Rivatuner when it is loading and sometimes it goes up to nearly 10gb of VRAM use. It's fine going into buildings, load times are very acceptable then but crap dude you load it in downtown Boston and it takes a bloody age !
You haven’t played Total War Warhammer then. On a HDD, loading screens can be over a minute compared to 10 or 15s on an SSD.
There's next to no difference in price ~5% between a large M2 NVMe SSD and a large SATA 6Gb SSD, NVMe is faster than the other, whether you can feel in or not with every application, it is a better drive with less system overhead, so I would get one of those, only possible exception is if you don't have a enough lanes to cope, you need 4 lanes per NVMe. Why would you buy the slower thing with same amount of storage other wise?
1TB Sata SSDs start at around £200 1TB Sata M.2 SSDs start at around £220 1TB NVME M.2 SSDs start at around £300 So it is a 50% difference.
