My usual go to drive layout, when it's impractical to put everything on a single drive, is to have a fast, but small, OS drive with core applications, if it's large enough then also use that for user data. Add in drives for anything/everything else size intensive. Like for games, I'll get a lower quality SSD that's larger than my OS drive, like grabbing a SATA SSD that's 3-4 TiB for games, with a 500GiB NVMe OS drive for programs and user data.

If money is tight, then having your fastest storage for OS and using a HDD for everything else, is a decent option..

For a while there I was running a 240GiB OS drive, and relocated all my user data, and games to a 1TiB HDD. The system ran fine like that, with few exceptions.

One big issue was that major windows updates basically failed every time, it would seem that having your user account/profile anywhere other than C:\ is problematic for that kind of thing. It's odd, but ultimately not that big of a deal. Regular security updates and whatnot worked without any issues.

[–] szczuroarturo@programming.dev 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Dont skimp on ssd for games. Large sata is fine. Hdd for games is not fine. Get worse anything else instead . Loadings are gonna be the death of you.

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 months ago

It's not as bad if the HDD is dedicated to games. With your os and games on the same drive, you're going to get wrecked.

I'd still recommend all flash everything in a decent home computer/gaming rig, but on a budget, at least separating your os from your games on different physical drives can help quite a bit.