Worth buying a 4 TB m.2 SSD?

So this is the state of my current storage setup

C and D is where WoW and other games are at

Think its time for buying a 4 TB SSD even though its like $500 for it?

Are those not ssds? If not then I highly recommend getting one it is 2021 after all

First two are, I’m saying I need more

Two drives completely empty, the drive you’re most likely to fill only at half… its your money in the end, but it isn’t worth it in my opinion.

Fewer and fewer games are starting to show appreciable benefit from running off SSDs anyway. I have no idea what they’re doing but they spend large swathes of their time “loading” not actually reading any data, or using any processor power, or touching RAM. I don’t think they’re doing the GTA4/Fallout 4 trick (where loading speed is tied to framerate, including V-sync) or the Mass Effect trick (where loading is tied to a video playing back), but they’re not doing whatever they’re doing well.

It’s all about how much cash you have lying around. I switched a 980 evo for a 4tb rocket and the increments in gaming performance where pretty “meh” but they were there.

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Depends on what you are going to do with it. If you plan to primarily play games off that drive and need 4TB of space… and you have the money I say go for it.

If you plan to do anything else with it, Like keep media files or use it as backup storage you probably won’t notice any difference between an hdd or ssd.

You probably should not put games on C: drive I haven’t done that since the 90s.

If you have the money, go for it. I plan on doing the same since my 2TB SSD that has my most-played games is almost full.

Your D: drive is only 50% full and you have almost 1TB of free space (and that’s excluding the slower drives which are entirely empty). What do you have planned that will require more space than that? It doesn’t look like you need more right now.

I agree with you for the most part but I do put two games on my C drive. GTA and WOW. They take up about 200 gigs. I run dual 1TB M.2’s (one for apps, and one for games) and my apps on the C drive never come close to filling it up. I back up the files on a 16TB HDD that I use for media. All in all that saves me 1/5th of the space on my game drive for two games I’ll probably never uninstall.

You aren’t wrong at all and I’ve done things that way for years, but putting monster big games on my C gives me more space on my games drive, which tends to be more fluid.

Depends a lot on usage habits. Personally I don’t need all my games available at a moment’s notice since there’s usually only a handful that I’m playing at any given time, and most of the work that’d take up drive space its done on a different machine so a quality 1TB drive is enough for me. If I’m adding more drives it’s typically for multibooting purposes, because juggling system partitions on a single drive sucks.

Back in the day this was a problem but I am not sure how it is now since I don’t do it , main reasons were for being able to restore my games without having to download again after a OS re-install.

The other reason was when disks were slower, when the game and OS competing for disk … I just got used to the habit of keeping games off C: I guess im old school. :joy:

If you’re using an SSD there’s very little reason not to have OS and program on the same drive. There will be some competition for throughput, but the primary reason it was beneficial on mech drives was the seek time as it darted back and forth between the two. SSDs have an effectively zero seek time, and as I mentioned very few games these days even come close to saturating the bandwidth of even an SATA SSD.

Only if you want to phase out all your other hard drives and not worry about storage anymore and have everything on one drive

If you’re going to keep the drive for a long time and if for gaming I’d highly recommend PCIE 4.0 drives only if possible. Windoze is getting an overhaul soon-ish. If games use Direct storage you’ll get more benefit out of higher speed drives.

M.2 is pretty fast, but you really wont notice much with this game, maybe a half second shorter load time…

No if you already have an SSD, chances are you wont notice the speed improvements, again only with loading

Im always hesitant to get the largest capacity SSD available, use to be those had a higher chance to fail or corrupt, unsure if thats still the case.

Also for longevity you may want a standard or junk drive for frequent downloads and deletes if your someone who likes to try lots of games, heavy installs and deletes on SSD can shorten their life.

Personally i just do a M.2 1 T for my OS and my longer term play games and two standard HDD for steam and junk games ill probably delete after a week. Cheap and works well this way. I didnt notice the improvement from SSD to M.2 personally.

SSD are pretty reliable these days, unless you’re using them for Chia mining.

The reason why higher capacity SSDs aren’t a good buy is because they are simply more expensive per GB.

If M.2 isn’t a big factor, just add a bunch of cheap 1TB SATA SSDs and create a big spanning volume across them. They’ll appear like a single big drive in Windows and you can drop all your games there.

(You can do the same with M.2 drives but usually you don’t have many M.2 ports on a motherboard and those multi-M.2 drive PCIe cards need MBs that can support the PCIe lanes).

You won’t get any speed advantages (like RAID0) or reliability (like RAID1), but if you have a bunch of smaller (and almost useless) SATA SSDs and available SATA ports, just add them into your machine (get some double sided sticky tape and tape those SSDs into your PC case if you run out of 3.5" slots) and span away.

It’s a quick and cheap way to get some use out of those older itty bitty SSDs. I had a bunch of 256/512 GB SSDs sitting around, now they make up a 2.25GB game “drive”.