Just use the 1tb drive! Not unless you want loads of games installed for the sake of it.

Just because you have an M.2 slot doesn't mean you should populate it. Which motherboard do you have?

You should review the motherboards block diagram to understand the actual electrical connectivity of the boards devices. For example; installing an M.2 drive in one of the M.2 slots may switch your GPU's PCIe lanes from x16 to x8, or might disable some portion of your SATA ports, etc.

If you add a sata harddr ive you dont have to buy so many expensive m2

Oledergames store on hdd, newer games m2

Well, there are so so many options i can think about, including HDD or SATA SSD, but i was thinking about capacity more than which type of drive it is.

For now my motherboard is Asrock X870 RS Pro [non wifi version], but i am thinking about changing it as i don't like the few reviews of people facing issue with Asrock motherboards and CPU 9800X3D, i don't care about the motherboard but i care about the CPU, so i am thinking to buy another brand X870 or even B850, it was cheapest X870 i found back in Dec 2024, i didn't know that Asrock mobos could have issues with 9800X3D.

From what i read it sounds that only first slot is a CPU related, and that is gen 5 one, but other slots are just gen 4, so if they are with GPU does it means if i use it with any SSD it will reduce the speed of GPU or anything else? What is the point to have more slots if it will have sharing speed or performance then?

I don't mind using SATAIII SSD, i can buy 2TB or even 4TB of that instead of NVMe SSD, but the speed will be only up to 560 somehow, i was thinking about having one drive at least for storage and not playing, so i use larger drive only to store games, while main drive to play games, i will transfer the games if i need space on the main drive, i just don't like the idea buying 4TB, people now saying that games nowadays are about 100-300GB size, i will not choose all games at those sizes and i am not interested, only few but not all, so if they are about 150GB average then if i only choose 5 games it means i still won't reach 1TB, but it is better to have enough free space too, so 2TB is maximum if i have to, but not 4TB or more, it is only for gaming, i have another computers for other things.

get a 500gb for O.S and a 2TB for games

Oprindeligt skrevet af tareqalhamrani:

Well, there are so so many options i can think about, including HDD or SATA SSD, but i was thinking about capacity more than which type of drive it is.

For now my motherboard is Asrock X870 RS Pro [non wifi version], but i am thinking about changing it as i don't like the few reviews of people facing issue with Asrock motherboards and CPU 9800X3D, i don't care about the motherboard but i care about the CPU, so i am thinking to buy another brand X870 or even B850, it was cheapest X870 i found back in Dec 2024, i didn't know that Asrock mobos could have issues with 9800X3D.

If you do decided to change the board feel free to post back here with which boards you are looking at and there are several people on these discussions that can double check that it'll work for what you are wanting to do.

Oprindeligt skrevet af tareqalhamrani:

From what i read it sounds that only first slot is a CPU related, and that is gen 5 one, but other slots are just gen 4, so if they are with GPU does it means if i use it with any SSD it will reduce the speed of GPU or anything else? What is the point to have more slots if it will have sharing speed or performance then?

Asrock X870 RS Pro Manual[download.asrock.com]

Page 11 is the block diagram

M.2_1 is the slot above the top PCIe x16 slot that is PCIe Gen5 x4 coming from the CPU
M.2_2 is the slot on the bottom toward the rear IO (left side of the board) which is PCIe Gen4 x4 that is shared with the PCIe_2 slot (PCIe_2 is an x16 slot that is electrically only wired for x4). If you install an M.2 device in M.2_2 then the PCIe_2 slot is disabled.
M.2_3 is the slot on the bottom toward the front (right side of the board) which is PCIe Gen3 x4.

So if you don't ever intend to install anything in the lower PCIe slot then you can use that M.2_2 slot and it'd be fine. If you intend to install something like a sound card, ect. in that PCIe slot then you wouldn't want to use that M.2_2 slot because it would disable the PCIe_2 slot.

Oprindeligt skrevet af tareqalhamrani:

...I don't mind using SATAIII SSD, i can buy 2TB or even 4TB of that instead of NVMe SSD, but the speed will be only up to 560 somehow, i was thinking about having one drive at least for storage and not playing, so i use larger drive only to store games, while main drive to play games, i will transfer the games if i need space on the main drive, i just don't like the idea buying 4TB, people now saying that games nowadays are about 100-300GB size, i will not choose all games at those sizes and i am not interested, only few but not all, so if they are about 150GB average then if i only choose 5 games it means i still won't reach 1TB, but it is better to have enough free space too, so 2TB is maximum if i have to, but not 4TB or more, it is only for gaming, i have another computers for other things.

The speed being limited on a SATAIII SSD is because it is SATAIII. The SATAIII bus is 6Gb/s which would equate to a theoretical maximum of 750MB/s if there was no overhead. In reality though it's not just the data going over that connection and there is overhead for the disk IO commands, etc. which eats into that theoretical maximum. The SATA protocol isn't terrible efficient for SSDs either as it was designed around how mechanical disks work and SATA itself is a 20+ year old protocol. NVMe was built specifically as a storage communication protocol for how flash storage works and it talks directly over PCIe. So in comparison, One (x1) lane of PCie Gen5 has a theoretical maximum of 4GB/s (which is 32Gb/s), so slot/SSD that is x4 has a theoretical maximum of 16GB/s (or 128Gb/s). The interface and bus speed for them is largely not the bottleneck any more and rather the SSD NAND controller is usually the limiting factor for NVMe SSDs.

Also, Most games are not 100GB - 300GB in size; however, a lot of new "AAA" games are 100GB+ and can be that large. So that notion really depends on the types of games you are interested in. Also, you aren't going to see a massive difference for games performance wise on a PCIe Gen5 SSD; other than with games that are write heavy (very few games are like this) or new games that are leveraging DirectStorage.

Looking at your current game library, most of the games are older games and aren't going to take up a lot of storage space. I'd suggest just getting a 1TB Gen4 or Gen5 NVMe SSD for your primary disk for the OS and then just plan on adding another cheaper NVMe SSD later if/when you need the additional storage. If you really want one right away, then you can get a decent 2TB Gen3 and some Gen4 SSDs for around the $100 - $130 price point.

Steam makes it really easy now to move games between Steam libraries on different disks. So doing some tiered storage like that is really easy now. If you're finding that you are adding a lot more to you games library you could also easily add a high capacity 3.5" SATA HDD for bulk storage and then just move the games you are actively playing to your SSDs. This is what I do as my game library is pretty large and I have the majority of it on 20TB HDDs and only move the games I'm regularly playing onto my SSDs while I'm playing them. For now, however, if I were in your shoes I'd just get a decent 1TB NVMe SSD as your primary and hold off on buying more storage until you actually need it.

OS should not be on your fastest drive....1tb gen 3 in a lower slot would be perfect for the OS.....

Oprindeligt skrevet af smokerob79:

OS should not be on your fastest drive....1tb gen 3 in a lower slot would be perfect for the OS.....

Humor me. Why shouldn't it be your fastest drive?

I can understand why it doesn't have to be the fastest drive. Pretty much any half decent SSD SATA or NVMe is good enough. My work PC used a SATA SSD for years and my gaming PC is all NVMe drives, and experience-wise there was very little difference. It's fine for the OS to be on a modest SSD. But I'm not sure why using the fastest drive is a problem. I mean I'm sure it's not, but I'd like to hear the rational for what seems like an overstated claim.