Hard Drives - Games

Not clear, but I assume when you say Seagate, you are talking about a mechanical hard drive?

The best storage option IMO is a smaller M.2 NVMe SSD for your primary (C:) drive, and a SATA SSD for games and apps. Prices are a little askew here versus online, so larger drives are a little pricy.

An M.2 form factor drive plugs directly into a slot on the motherboard, and requires no wires or cables. They work off the PCIe bus like a GPU, and they are therefore 5 times or more faster than a normal SATA SSD. All that killer speed is a blessing when it comes to operating Windows, your maintenance scanning software, your browser, and cloning/backing up your operating system. IMO, you benefit from keeping that small because booting, scanning and cloning happens in very short time spans. you don't really need that extra for loading games and software. if you ever have to do a clean install, you will have to wipe your OS drive completely. If it's on a large drive with all kinds of apps and games, you have to re-install everything.

So, you can save money by getting one of the smaller NVMes and keep it that way, or you can get a !TB one and partition it small for your OS and all that. you can also partition a small NVMe if you want

The second drive where you keep most everything else can be a SATA SSD in any size you want, but above 1TB, they are like I said, pricy. If you can add your own later, just get 1TB and add to it as you need to.

The best NVMe SSD here and just about all over is the Samsung 980 PRO that just arrived here. If you get the smaller one, and you need to save a little cash, get the Seagate Firecuda. It's a bit slower, but you'll never know it.

For secondary storage, get a Samsung 860 EVO in any size you want to pay for.

Originally posted by Cretae An M.2 form factor drive plugs directly into a slot on the motherboard, and requires no wires or cables. They work off the PCIe bus like a GPU, and they are therefore 5 times or more faster than a normal SATA SSD. All that killer speed is a blessing when it comes to operating Windows, your maintenance scanning software, your browser, and cloning/backing up your operating system. IMO, you benefit from keeping that small because booting, scanning and cloning happens in very short time spans. you don't really need that extra for loading games and software. if you ever have to do a clean install, you will have to wipe your OS drive completely. If it's on a large drive with all kinds of apps and games, you have to re-install everything.

Originally posted by Bob100 As a flight sim player myself.

Thanks, Bob100 for your take on flight simulators and your rig. To be fair, the new machine will be largely for my son, however, I plan to steal it from time-to-time to fly. I'm pretty confident that it will run all IL-2 simulators just fine. Fingers crossed.

AFIK, windows would act like you just downloaded that game the first time you start it up again, and look for all the set-up files the game provides. Your saves are almost always in the cloud or in the game files. When I got my newest DS, I brought over a whole HDD full of games from my other computer, and everything worked perfectly first time, and all my saves were there...somewhere.

As far as what to put on there, any app you are concerned about security per your thought. Any productivity app that will benefit from operating at super speed. Anything else you wish.

It's just a suggestion that has worked well for me. My previous computer took several minutes to scan, and I hated the waiting, so I didn't do it as often as I should have. My more compact and much faster NVMe scans often in seconds, and always under 2 minutes.