Should I store my games on my SSD or hard drive?

Santos wants to know where he should be storing his games, on his SSD or HDD.

Question by Santos from Canada | Answered by in Storage on

A friend of mine helped me build my PC (i9-9900K, Z390 AORUS Ultra and RTX 2080 Ti). My current storage is a 1TB NVMe and 2TB FireCuda HDD. Recently, I heard my brother tell a friend to move all of his games to a secondary drive to not slow down Windows.

Hearing this, I started the move myself moving my games from the 1TB NVMe to the FireCuda. Somewhere in the middle of this move, I panicked reading online people say games should be on SSD, so I stopped the move and now have games that will no longer load.

The question is, if I start fresh, should I put games on NVMe or on secondary drive? Thanks!

Hi Santos,

The easy answer: games on the quickest storage for the shortest load times.

Should I store my games on my SSD or hard drive? 1

The long version: Are they taking up a lot of space on the NVMe? You have 1TB, if the total usage is under 75%, I would say leave the games on the NVMe.

There will be performance loss moving the games to the FireCuda, but it may not be noticeable if you are playing the same games more often because the drive will cache the most used files and launch them at better speeds.

Another thing, if you have the spare cash, your motherboard does support an additional NVMe SSD, so with current prices, you could add a 1TB game drive for right around $100 USD.

Last updated: Nov 3, 2020 at 07:10 pm CST

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