M.2 for Dummies... better for boot or games drive?

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Lumpus

Lumpus

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May 1, 2015
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My new AMD 2600X/2700X build will have an X470 board with two M.2 slots. Currently I'm booting from a 500gb 2.5" PCIe Samsung SSD, which is actually plenty for just O/S. I am wanting a much faster games drive, but not sure whether 1GB M.2 or a new PCIe SSD would be best for this... or if I should move the boot to M.2? Are they fairly identical speeds and more or less interchangeable?
/totally confused....
 
Solution
jankerson
I can tell you what I do.

I have a Samsung 250gb 960 EVO M.2 as the boot drive and a 500gb Samsung 860 EVO SATA as my game drive then a 1 TB Seagate for data etc.
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ikaz

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Dec 27, 2005
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You should boot off the M.2 with NWMe drive it "faster" than PCIe SSD that being said probably won't notice a difference also as far as gaming using SSD drive will only help with loading a game not with FPS while actually gaming.
 
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justin.m.beauvais

justin.m.beauvais

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Dec 15, 2017
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Well... generally, you should be booting off of the fastest drive and loading everything you want to use really quickly off of it too. However, if both drives have roughly the same performance, it doesn't really matter, like, at all. In this specific case you can do whatever you want.
 
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coozie7

coozie7

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Jun 2, 2007
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Most of us won't see much difference between the two TBH although a PCI-E NVMe M2 drive is going to be far quicker in numbers terms for actual load/save/ boot TIMES you're only going to be talking in terms of a few seconds difference.
The big advantage I find with PCI-E M2 drives is the much higher write speeds, but then again I do a fair bit of hobby rendering and animation so the ability to quickly write very large files comes in handy.

Considering the cost of such a large drive I'd suggest you actually go for a 512Gb PCI-E M2 drive and split your storage across both, using the faster M2 for speed critical applications with the slower ( current ) SATA drive for other stuff. You'll still have 1Tb of fast storage and save yourself a packet.
 
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