Question motherboard latency and dual NVMes

[Dave3000]

Would it be less latency if operating system and games were installed on a single NVMe drive but partition accordingly than the OS on its own NVMe drive and Game on it's own NVMe drive since the communication between the two NVMe drives still have to goes across the motherboard. If this is true then is there no point in having a slower (or same speed but in the 2nd M.2 slot which is slower on my motherboard) 2nd NVMe drive for just games if it's for the purpose of having better loading speeds and less stuttering? So basically what I'm asking is does motherboard add latency with multiple NVMe drive inter-communication than if it the communcation was only within a single NVMe drive (shorter distance for data to travel) but with multiple partitions instead of multiple dedicated physical NVMe drives? If the m.2 slots were the same speed with the same drives then this hypothesis wouldn't make sense for a multiple NVMe drive configuration?

 

[Dave3000]

The reason I'm asking this is because I have a dual boot setup with Linux Mint as my primary OS on my 1st 2TB 980 Pro on the 1st m.2 slot (PCI-E 4.0) with a dedicated data-ext4 partition for my games and data storage that I only use in Linux, and Windows 10 as my secondary OS on my 2nd 2TB 980 Pro on the 2nd m.2 slot (PCI-E 3.0) with a dedicated data-ntfs partition for just data storage that will only be used for Windows stuff. I'm just wondering if this is better in terms of storage speed than having both OSs installed on the 1st 980 Pro and having a data-ext4 and a data-ntfs partition on the 2nd 980 Pro? Data also includes my installed games. I always heard that it's better to have each OS on their own drive with their own EFI partition if dual booting than sharing a single drive between OSs.

 

[igor_kavinski]

What you have already done (segregating each OS and related data to its own SSD) is better. The other approach will just complicate things. However, I think Windows games are more likely to benefit from PCIe 4.0 with DirectStorage technology being utilized in future games. Don't think any Linux game has even been announced that will take advantage of PCIe 4.0's quick loading speeds. Even then, difference between 3.0 and 4.0 would be about 5 seconds in typical game loading scenarios.

 

[BFG10K]

The original post makes my head spin. No way you'll notice a lick of difference between any of those scenarios. Just pick the simplest option.

Unless all you do is copy files all day or have some kind of niche I/O workload, most users won't even notice the difference between SATA2 SSD and Gen5 NVMe.

 

[00Logic]

Having both OSs on one drive and two data partitions on the 2nd drive will be quite a bit faster:

Drives 'like' pure reads or pure writes.
Anything in between results in a U shaped graph where the typical OS's simultaneous 70% read/30% write performance is now around 60% of the pure read and write speeds bandied about by advertisers.

When loading an app or game there is a lot of writing to the page files and windows is logging everything, then logging the logs and making a log of that log etc-etc-etc.
Segregating the reads and writes to 2 different drives means they can operate at their advertised speeds more often.

NB that with 2 pagefiles on 2 separate drives; Windows will now auto use the least in-use drive, or use both together in a kind of RAID 0. I assume Linux is similar.
So adding a 2nd pagefile (and Linux equivalent) to the 2nd data drive gives your OS even more flexibility to better auto optimise paged data and thus I/O in general and avoid simultaneous read/writes.

If you are mixing Linux and Windblows you may be interested in WinBtrfs:

GitHub - maharmstone/btrfs: WinBtrfs - an open-source btrfs driver for Windows

WinBtrfs - an open-source btrfs driver for Windows - GitHub - maharmstone/btrfs: WinBtrfs - an open-source btrfs driver for Windows

github.com

 

[igor_kavinski]

If you are mixing Linux and Windblows you may be interested in WinBtrfs:

GitHub - maharmstone/btrfs: WinBtrfs - an open-source btrfs driver for Windows

WinBtrfs - an open-source btrfs driver for Windows - GitHub - maharmstone/btrfs: WinBtrfs - an open-source btrfs driver for Windows

github.com

Asking for trouble if used with critical data but for experimentation, that's pretty interesting.