M.2 Storage advice needed!?

[dockers_strike]

Fuck me, pc components continue to advance beyond my capability!

 

My lad is looking at a custom build pc for gaming. Amongst the potential specs for this are M.2 250GB storage, more M.2 storage, a 1TB SSD and a 2TB HDD. My fucking head is spinning.

 

Does the M.2 storage replace what used to be RAM or is it purely to help boot up, speed up the transfer of data to \ from the SSD? For gaming, can you just spec M.2 and an SSD? If you have 250GB of M.2 storage, is it worth it getting say another 250GB M.2 where the motherboard supports it?

 

Is it best to forget about an HDD these days and just go for as much M.2 and SSD storage as you can afford? Seen some suggestion to also fit an HDD for 'general' storage but why bother with that if you have a 1TB SSD?

 

Thanks for any help!

[Chairman Meow]

M2 is just a new drive type and currently the fastest type available.

 

My setup is currently 2 x M.2 NVMe drives which I run my OS and software from.

 

I also have an SSD for my general working data and then use 2 regular HDD for backup/larger storage.

 

The problem with only having NVMe or SSD is that they don't offer the same life cycle as an old fashioned drive so if they fail you will find it way harder to recover any data. It's not impossible, but typically rare.

 

Whereas regular drives will generally be recoverable if it's something important you really do not want to lose. 

 

 

[Guest]

46 minutes ago, Chairman Meow said:

M2 is just a new drive type and currently the fastest type available.

 

My setup is currently 2 x M.2 NVMe drives which I run my OS and software from.

 

I also have an SSD for my general working data and then use 2 regular HDD for backup/larger storage.

 

The problem with only having NVMe or SSD is that they don't offer the same life cycle as an old fashioned drive so if they fail you will find it way harder to recover any data. It's not impossible, but typically rare.

 

Whereas regular drives will generally be recoverable if it's something important you really do not want to lose. 

 

 

Yes, same here. SSDs are great for OS optimisation but the benefits to gaming are not so obvious. With the PS5/XBOX SSDs the entire system has been optimised for using the onboard SSD. Put another SSD and you don't get the same benefits at all.

 

I like having SSD storage on PC but it's not essential and it's certainly not cost effective. Best to use SSD for OS plus important software, possibly SSD for gameplay but HDD for storage and/or gameplay.

[Mudface]

I sometimes put a game with potentially long loading times on my SSD, otherwise it's OS only, with my documents and everything else put onto a 'normal' hard drive and backed up if it's particularly important.