Having windows on a separate drive is preferable for games as it keeps them isolated from other files.
Having windows on a separate drive is preferable for games as it keeps them isolated from other files.
You have Windows on a 256GB SATA drive and games on a 1TB M.2 drive. You're considering moving everything to the larger M.2 drive for better performance.
I think it varies. I store my Steam library on a different drive, which gives me flexibility—moving it to another computer or keeping it after a fresh install works well.
I believe you're targeting the incorrect location. Keeping games and the operating system on separate drives won't affect each other. The performance of the game drive alone might influence results, so you may want to consider that. However, the separation between games and OS doesn't impact performance at all.
There are some games that don't like being in the "Program Files" folders on the C: drive...
These operations mainly happen in memory. They are loaded into RAM when they begin and the disk is used if a read or write is needed. The amount of RAM available would significantly affect performance. Back in the day with limited RAM (around 1GB or less), there would be frequent reading and writing to the page file, which acts as virtual memory. Today, with 8GB or more in most gaming PCs, this shouldn't be a problem. The operating system will still manage these tasks no matter which drive or application is running. SSDs are much faster than traditional spinning disks, which suffer from delays because the heads must physically move across the platters. SSDs and NVMe technology remove this lag.
Discover fresh titles often require significant RAM, which can strain the page file. Reducing lag depends on placing the page file on a fast storage device, not necessarily matching the OS type (e.g., OS on HDD, games and page file on SSD). I prefer a responsive OS with page files on the quicker drive, allowing games to run on slower ones—though loading may be slower there, but issues are minimal.