Is there any performance difference if a game is installed on a different drive to your OS?

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lewiswhite87

Sep 18, 2018
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Long ago, I thought I was a bit clever by installing Windows on a 7200rpm hard drive, and using two smaller, more expensive 10,000rpm drives in RAID 0 for ridiculous loading times in games etc. I was told this wasn't actually a great idea as Windows has to execute the code for the game, so bits & pieces have to be passed across drives. I'm just wondering with today's NVMe SSDs etc if you'd still notice any performance difference doing this.

Now I have Windows and a couple of AAA games on my 256gb 960 Evo, with some less demanding games and most applications on a SATA SSD. Eventually I want to add a second, bigger NVMe drive to store more big titles on, but not sure if the performance (loading times, latency loading small files during play etc) will be affected by having them on a different drive to Windows. Surely it shouldn't make a difference which NVMe drive the CPU requests the data from and sticks it in RAM?

Was there even any truth in this in the first place? :)
 
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TerryLaze

The system will have to read from both the system drive and the raid but that doesn't change anything,well maybe if your I/O subsystem is not on par it will bottleneck your maximum throughput of data so you won't get the highest speed increase possible but the same stands for everything being on the same drive, otherwise this is what you should do if you have the possibility.

Bottom line put your games anywhere they fit, the speed of the drive is much more important than anything else.
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spdragoo

spdragoo

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Oct 17, 2011
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From the OS perspective, having it on a different drive is no different than having it in a different folder, or having it on a logical drive: as long as it knows where it's at, the location doesn't affect the OS's ability to locate/access it.

Now, the type of drive will affect the initial load time for the game, the loading of new textures, & possibly the loading of some cutscenes in the game. And yes, NVMe drives will have faster access times than SATA SSDs, which will have faster access than SATA HDDs (or, shudder, PATA drives if you're still using those). However, for the most part you're talking about cutting off no more than a minute (maybe 2 tops) on the total time while playing a game, so unless you're going to do a marathon 12-hour session you probably won't see a whole lot of difference.
 
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TerryLaze

TerryLaze

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May 9, 2016
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The system will have to read from both the system drive and the raid but that doesn't change anything,well maybe if your I/O subsystem is not on par it will bottleneck your maximum throughput of data so you won't get the highest speed increase possible but the same stands for everything being on the same drive, otherwise this is what you should do if you have the possibility.

Bottom line put your games anywhere they fit, the speed of the drive is much more important than anything else.
 
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Dunlop0078

Dunlop0078

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Feb 13, 2014
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I have never heard that, if anything I have heard it's better to put games on another drive that windows is not on so the only thing using resources of the drive with the game installed is the game. If there is a difference it is certainly not noticeable to me. I have a 960 evo as my boot drive and I use 2 sata SSD's to store most of my games, never had an issue with that.
 
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