Question OS Drive Size & Partition vs. Physical Drive

[In2Photos]

I'm wondering what everyone's strategy is these days for drive sizes and partitions vs. physical drives. I've always been one to try and keep my OS drive separate from any data drives. My current gaming/photo PC has a 500GB OS drive (upgraded from a 128GB drive a few years back), and separate drives for both photos (1TB) and games (750GB). I'm planning a new build and just bought my daughter some new gear and it has me questioning whether I need to stay with this same thought process or evolve.

With the exception of my work PC I have never really had an OS drive get bigger than ~150GB. So I don't really see a need to buy a drive bigger than 500GB for an OS. But price differences between NVME drives of 500GB and 1TB are not much ($40-$60). Prices from 1TB to 2TB are typically double ($60-$120) though and most motherboards only have room for 2-4 NVME drives so planning is important unless you are OK with using SATA SSDs instead. I'm not super concerned about drive speeds, coming from spinners for my data drives any SSD will be faster.

Scenario 1 ($160-$300)
500GB or 1TB OS drive (lots of free unused space)
1 or 2TB Photo Drive
1 or 2TB Games Drive

Scenario 2 ($180-$240)
2TB drive with 500GB OS partition and 1.5TB Photo partition
1 or 2TB Games Drive

Both scenarios could yield roughly the same amount of storage. Scenario 1 uses 3 M.2 slots and in most motherboards that probably means there are no spare slots, whereas Scenario 2 frees up a slot.

So how do you handle your storage drives?

 

[TheELF]

It comes down to personal taste and the options you have.

Having the boot and the OS on a partition each makes it super easy to backup and restore the OS as images if the need arises without having to mess anything else up.
If your OS partition contains a lot of data you have to copy all of it off drive then reinstall windows then copy everything back onto the drive.

But if you have ways of reading the disk on a different system and you are not planning on borking up your OS every other week then either method is fine, I mean it's pretty tough nowadays to get your OS so messed up it wont work anymore.

 

[WilliamM2]

Option 3:

500 GB OS drive NVME
2 TB Game AND photo drive - NVME, or even sata SSD
2TB BACKUP drive - spinner will be fine. - This will hold all your backup files and images.

A second backup isn't a horrible idea either.

I don't partition drives anymore, no real purpose.

 

[Tech Junky]

I limit the OS to 100GB period. There's no reason for letting it take up more space than necessary with aps installed.



For bulk storage though I use 8TB drives on my server / NAS / DIY router setup.

 lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE   MOUNTPOINTS
sda           8:0    0   7.3T  0 disk   
└─sda1        8:1    0   7.3T  0 part   
  └─md0       9:0    0  18.2T  0 raid10 /mnt/Storage
sdb           8:16   0   7.3T  0 disk   
└─sdb1        8:17   0   7.3T  0 part   
  └─md0       9:0    0  18.2T  0 raid10 /mnt/Storage
sdc           8:32   0   7.3T  0 disk   
└─sdc1        8:33   0   7.3T  0 part   
  └─md0       9:0    0  18.2T  0 raid10 /mnt/Storage
sdd           8:48   0   7.3T  0 disk   
└─sdd1        8:49   0   7.3T  0 part   
  └─md0       9:0    0  18.2T  0 raid10 /mnt/Storage
sde           8:64   0   7.3T  0 disk   
└─sde1        8:65   0   7.3T  0 part   
  └─md0       9:0    0  18.2T  0 raid10 /mnt/Storage
nvme0n1     259:0    0 931.5G  0 disk   
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0    49M  0 part   /boot/efi
└─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0 931.5G  0 part   /

Drives:
  Local Storage: total: raw: 37.3 TiB usable: 19.1 TiB used: 8.67 TiB (45.4%)
  ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Western Digital model: WDS100T1X0E-00AFY0 size: 931.51 GiB
  ID-2: /dev/sda vendor: Western Digital model: WD80EZAZ-11TDBA0 size: 7.28 TiB
  ID-3: /dev/sdb vendor: Western Digital model: WD80EZAZ-11TDBA0 size: 7.28 TiB
  ID-4: /dev/sdc vendor: Western Digital model: WD80EZAZ-11TDBA0 size: 7.28 TiB
  ID-5: /dev/sdd vendor: Western Digital model: WD80EZAZ-11TDBA0 size: 7.28 TiB
  ID-6: /dev/sde vendor: Western Digital model: WD80EZAZ-11TDBA0 size: 7.28 TiB
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 915.78 GiB used: 20.56 GiB (2.2%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2
  ID-2: /boot/efi size: 48.9 MiB used: 8.2 MiB (16.8%) fs: vfat dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1

As for picking drives though my personal baseline on NVME drives is 1TB because you tend to get better warranty terms with 5 years / 1xxx TBW compared to lower capacities along with higher throughput speeds which becomes negligible outside of booting / loading large files/games.

 

[In2Photos]

Option 3:

500 GB OS drive NVME
2 TB Game AND photo drive - NVME, or even sata SSD
2TB BACKUP drive - spinner will be fine. - This will hold all your backup files and images.

A second backup isn't a horrible idea either.

I don't partition drives anymore, no real purpose.

That could work, but I would be limited in space for new photos/games. I should also mention that I have an UnRAID server that I use for backups/images. I tend to lean on the no partitioning side of things as well. The only time I do use partitions is with a laptop that has only a single drive so I can separate OS from data, but even then I typically don't store data on a laptop.

I limit the OS to 100GB period. There's no reason for letting it take up more space than necessary with aps installed.

I feel like 100GB is cutting it a little too close, but I'm guessing you install any additional apps/software on the other partition so this is really OS only?

For bulk storage though I use 8TB drives on my server / NAS / DIY router setup.

As for picking drives though my personal baseline on NVME drives is 1TB because you tend to get better warranty terms with 5 years / 1xxx TBW compared to lower capacities along with higher throughput speeds which becomes negligible outside of booting / loading large files/games.

I have 3-3TB drives, plus 1-4TB for parity in my UnRAID server and still have plenty of space so I'm good there for now. Good point on the NVME drive size for warranty and endurance.

 

[Tech Junky]

No, 100gb is my limit with all apps. Games don't need to be on C nor do any files that open with installed apps. I redirect all downloads to the network location as most of them are temporary anyway. I have two drives in the laptop as shown above with the primary being split partitions and the second that is a duplicate of the storage partition as a backup for things locally.

I had one laptop that had 2x M2 and a 2.5" bay. Most newer laptops tend to have two NVME slots though. If you need space there are ways to make it work without spending a ton on them. Like using an enclosure for a spare drive that holds all of your stuff you only use at home. 2.5" SSD prices for a 4tb drive aren't all that bad and would be enough for what you're talking about. Though their prices are a bit higher than what you're thinking about for budget.

 

[mindless1]

I do similar, OS and apps on C: partition that gets regular partition imaged backups, then static files, user data, etc goes on a different partition whether it be the same SSD the C: partition is on, or a different SSD or HDD.

However the user data folders get the most frequent backups but just by a file compare/sync operation, not a partition backup. Everything else gets a file compare/sync less often to offline HDDs.

Back to the original question, size. When I first started using SSDs, at a much higher cost:capacity ratio, OS was on a 32GB SSD. Over time, cost:capacity dropped, so the C: partition drives got larger and larger.

If I was trying to do a build (nearly) as cheaply as possible, I'd use a mere 240GB SSD, not bothering to try to save little more than the cost of lunch, picking a 128GB or smaller SSD instead. This is just for the C: OS partition, then if the SSD is larger, I'd put a 2nd partition on it, or if more SSDs are in the system then use those for other non-OS/app files.

I prefer multiple SSDs, as this means if the OS SSD were to fail, I can have a partition backup of it on the other SSD, and restore that, be back up and running again in ~5 minutes. I also store the partition backups offline.

 

[Tech Junky]

@mindless1

Yeah, I backup my server os to the raid on the same box every 6 hours with rsync using a differential. Don't really need to since it's a pretty static configuration other than os updates. Just something that happens in the background at this point. I moved all of the Plex stuff off the NVME to the raid since it's somewhat bloated with all of the metadata and artwork.

I still like the endurance ratings of larger drives even if it costs a bit more. Isolating the os in a small partition makes for less loss rather than putting everything in the same basket.

@In2Photos I would do a primary split of 1tb for os and storage. Then maybe a 2nd 1tb for a quick backup and a spinner for longer term storage. Otherwise you could pick up a 4tb NVME or SSD for about $350 and have a high speed bulk space for things. Spinners though you could do 18tb for about $200 and still get close to 300mb/s out of it.

 

[mikeymikec]

Ever since I started using SSDs, I've just used a single storage partition per drive:

SSD1: Win10 + installed games
SSD2: Linux, home directory, documents
HDD1: rest of my data

The HDD is a 4TB model. I'd be surprised if 4TB SSDs that perform well will come down to what I regard as a reasonable price at any time soon, so I guess I'm probably stuck on this data storage schema for life.