Up until 5–6 years ago, it was popular wisdom to install your operating system on a 120GB or 250GB SSD, and everything else, including games, on a 1TB or 2TB hard drive. Gamers did this to offset the relatively prohibitive prices of SSDs, which have since come down to a point where the performance benefits of an SSD-only system far outweigh the minimal added cost.
However, most gaming PCs today have a single 1TB or 2TB SSD containing the entirety of their data — Windows, games, other programs, and media files. Having a dedicated SSD for your games alone might not introduce any performance advantage, but it can certainly benefit you in other ways. Keeping your system data and game files on separate drives might save you money in the long run, and a lot of time if something goes wrong with the drive.
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3 Make your primary boot drive last longer
SSD wear and tear is real
In case you aren't aware, SSDs have a limited lifespan. Although a modern NVMe SSD can last for over 5–7 years, even with intensive daily use, you might be interested in learning how to extend your SSD's lifespan. One of the simplest ways is to reduce the regular wear and tear on your SSD by reducing the number of writes on it during its lifespan.
If you have a single NVMe SSD for everything, and use your PC mostly for gaming, chances are that you frequently install and uninstall a lot of games. Combine that with saving and editing gameplay videos, installing and removing dozens of programs every so often, and offloading all your photos and videos from your phone to the PC, and you're looking at quite a bit of "write overhead" on your sole SSD.
Compare this to having a dedicated SSD for your games, programs, and media, where you can freely do your thing without worrying about reducing the lifespan of a single drive. You can have a smaller SSD only for your operating system and a small set of programs, which will consequently allow it to last longer, since the bulk of the writes on your system will happen on your game drive.
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2 Avoid choking the OS with huge game files
It's easy to run out of space
Most PC builders install a single 1TB SSD these days, partitioning it into a Windows partition and a couple of other partitions for games and media. While this approach works just fine in the short term, you can soon run out of space on your games partition, eyeing the Windows partition next. Extending your games partition using the free space carved out from the Windows partition seems like the right idea, but if it's already too small to begin with, you'll run into a roadblock.
A possible solution to solve, or at least delay the problem, is to buy two separate drives when building the PC — a large 2TB SSD for games and other media, and a smaller 250GB SSD for Windows and a few programs. This way, you'll take considerably longer to fill up your game drive, and considering the prices of the best gaming SSDs, 2TB drives are quite affordable now. And you won't be wasting too much money or free space with the 250GB drive.
It's recommended to leave around 10% of the SSD capacity free to allow garbage collection and other maintenance tasks. Although over-provisioning already takes care of this by reserving around 7% of the capacity that you can't use to store data, it's still good to have a large enough SSD that you're not forced to fill to the brim.
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1 No game reinstallation if the OS drive gets corrupted
Add some redundancy to your PC
SSDs are usually tough, but they're also prone to failure if you're unlucky. Power outages, surges, incorrect shutdowns, bad blocks, and more can corrupt some or all of the data on an SSD. On a single "Windows + games" SSD, this might require, in the worst case, formatting the entire drive to be able to use it again. Reinstalling Windows is only part of the hassle, as you'll also need to download and install all your games, launchers, and associated programs.
Again, separating Windows from the rest of your data can prove immensely helpful in such situations. With Windows on a separate drive, any corruption or failure that strikes the SSD can be rooted out without affecting your game files, media, and programs. You could say that disaster can strike the game drive too, but having two separate drives still introduces redundancy into the system, reducing the chances of data loss.
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Consider multiple SSDs for your gaming PC
A single large SSD can work without issues for the majority of users, but if you want to be better prepared for unexpected issues, two SSDs are a good idea. A dedicated SSD for both Windows and games can help keep any hardware faults restricted to either drive, protecting your data on the other. It also helps to prolong the life of your boot drive, since you'll be performing most of the write operations on the game drive.