Question Is it ridiculous not to have a dedicated Windows partition and a dedicated Data or Games partition on an SSD that is 1TB or larger?

Dave3000 · Thursday at 12:22 PM

I can understand having an SSD 500GB or less dedicated just for the OS and basic apps. However, is it ridiculous not to create a partition dedicated for OS and basic apps and partition the rest for Data or Games if a drive is 1TB or larger if it's your only drive in the system. Also I want to point out that having a separate physical drive for the OS and a separate physical drive for Data or Games increases the chance of having a drive failure in your system because you have one more drive that can and will at some point fail, so if someone says that having 2 physical drives in there system means that their data will be safe if there OS drive fails but it can go the other way around, the OS drive can be safe but the Data drive can fail. It's only safer if both drives are storing the same data redundantly than that is the only way having 2 drives is safer than one.

Hail The Brain Slug · Friday at 10:09 AM

With the prevalence of fast internet, for many people redownloading games is a non-issue. I never break up a drive these days.

If I'm trying to keep a local copy of games they go on my server. Client storage should be transient, not relied upon because there are virtually zero safety mechanisms present on a consumer windows box. You're one bad windows update away from the file system getting corrupted and bricking all your partitions anyway.

dave_the_nerd · Saturday at 7:51 PM

I don’t really think there’s much benefit to partitioning for a desktop computer.

Storage is storage. :shrug:

CP5670 · Saturday at 11:59 PM

I have separate drives for windows and games/apps, 6 in total, makes it easier to do backups and restores. The chance of a failure is higher but that failure is also less likely to take down everything, and I can keep adding new drives over time if I need more space.

mikeymikec · Sunday at 3:13 AM

I haven't done manual partitioning in ages. Once upon a time I thought it was handy to keep the OS separate so that if I decide to wipe and reinstall, I only have to wipe the OS partition and the rest doesn't *have to be* backed up. These days though, installing an OS takes a fraction of the time it used to.

On my server I partitioned the OS off because a partial security compromise (e.g. gaining privs into where website files are located) might make it harder for the attacker to breach the main OS (e.g. difficult to relative path one's way from D to C drive).

I don't purposefully have a multi-drive layout as it doesn't make any difference against drive failure, it's just the way my setup has evolved because it's always been cheaper to have a smaller SSD coupled with a data HDD. Eventually I hope to replace the data HDD with a data SSD to make my system quieter, but unless I start using a single OS rather than the dual-boot setup I've been doing since 2018, I don't see me changing back to a single disk setup at any time soon because there's little or no benefit from it.

On simple single-disk, single-OS setups, I don't do any manual partitioning.

Dave3000 · 2025-05-12T03:08:43-0400

CP5670 said:
I have separate drives for windows and games/apps, 6 in total, makes it easier to do backups and restores. The chance of a failure is higher but that failure is also less likely to take down everything, and I can keep adding new drives over time if I need more space.

I don't care if I lose my OS installation due to a drive failure on a drive that just has my OS installed on if my data is stored on another drive. I care about losing my data however. A separate physical drive that doesn't store a duplicate of my data means nothing to me in terms of safety, so a physical drive that just stores the OS and it fails, I could easily reinstall the OS on a new drive, it shouldn't take longer than 1 hour, including the drivers and Windows updates. I don't even backup my OS installation, only important data on my data partition to an external SSD that would not be easily replaceable. SSDs smaller than 1TB is getting phased out, it's now common that some manufacturers only start at 1TB for their smallest capacities for a recent series, for example, Samsung for their 990 Pro and 9100 Pro Series NVMe drives. Not to mention that it's common for entry level to mid-range motherboards to have only 1 M.2 slot that's the fastest one on the motherboard or linked to the CPU lanes and the other M.2 slots linked to the chipset lanes and a lower Gen in some of those motherboards. I used to have a separate 1TB 990 Pro just for the OS and Apps and my 4TB 990 Pro for everything else, but I decided to just partition my 4TB 990 Pro to 250GB for OS and Apps and the rest for everything else and move the 1TB 990 Pro to my secondary system, again partitioned at 250GB for OS and Apps and the rest for everything else. The benefit of this is that I have my games and OS installed on the NVME installed on the fastest M.2 slot in the system even it it's the same Gen, the CPU lanes one is a little faster still than the other M.2 slots that are linked to the chipset lanes. I also just need to worry about one drive failing than 2 drives failing on each system.

CP5670 · 2025-05-13T12:37:29-0400

I have the same 1TB 990 pro drive for the OS. The OS drive has the user/local accounts folders which has a lot of important data. The other drives have game installs and contain some important things too, but I schedule backups for them less frequently. I always migrate the OS across hardware, and roll back if something goes wrong. I haven't actually done a fresh Windows install since 2010 or something when Windows 8 came out. The issue is configuring everything to my liking with numerous registry edits, settings and config changes I did over the years and reinstalling all programs and tools would take forever.

mikeymikec · 2025-05-13T12:43:02-0400

A separate games partition - it hasn't been said so I'll say it - the install footprint of many modern games these days means you'll need all the TB you can get, which IMO renders the topic of "should I partition" pretty much moot. My brother mentioned that a Call of Duty game has a 250GB footprint, BG3's footprint is nearly 160GB, etc.

When I migrated from a 250GB Windows/games drive to my current 1TB drive, I thought I'd catch a break from having one modern game installed at a time Kinda sorta.

mindless1 · 2025-05-13T15:32:37-0400

Things that take time to tweak to my liking, and are subject to implode, go on the same partition. This includes windows itself, and some apps. This partition has an image backup made monthly, or right before I do something potentially risky like do a bunch of windows updates (which I do in larger batches, never just letting windows auto-update a thing at a time, constantly).

Since I don't want to waste much drive space that could be put on a separate partition, and don't want my partition backups to be unnecessarily huge to monthly backup things that don't change month to month, that partition isn't much bigger than it needs to be, typically about 100GB still leaves a fair amount of free space. Everything else goes on either a 2nd partition, or the rest plus two copies of the partition image of the OS partition goes on separate 2nd/3rd/etc SSD or HDD.

Games recently played and some static apps (that I can just reinstall and use, no configuration needed) go on a separate partition or SSD in same system but much of the rest and a lot more is on a NAS with a redundant offline backup.

As far as # of drives vs failure, I think I only had one SSD ever fail, some early era (Zalman?) 32GB SATA. It didn't completely fail, just corrupted somehow, so at a mere 32GB not even worth the bother to reuse. It wasn't in use long enough to hit a write cycle limit. I even put 7 leftover 240GB SSDs into a couple of RAID arrays, several years ago and no problems yet.

Question Is it ridiculous not to have a dedicated Windows partition and a dedicated Data or Games partition on an SSD that is 1TB or larger?

Dave3000

Golden Member

Hail The Brain Slug

Diamond Member

dave_the_nerd

Lifer

CP5670

Diamond Member

mikeymikec

Lifer

Dave3000

Golden Member

CP5670

Diamond Member

mikeymikec

Lifer

mindless1

Diamond Member

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