I finished my first build a few months ago, put fedora workstation on it, everything’s been great so far, but there are a few games I have and love which don’t work, or are incredibly unstable. so I’m looking for a small, let’s say 256gb SSD, to dual boot with windows for those games as well as creative work with lightroom.
My current drive has enough storage for a windows dual boot on its own, but I do not want windows to hide the linux partition or delete it completely.
So my questions are:
- Should I get a larger SSD than 256gb?
- what would be a good drive at that size?
It largely doesn’t make sense to get small SSDs at this point. 500 gig drives aren’t that much more than 250 gig drives. And not only do you get twice the storage, but usually better performance too.
Micro center has a 512 gig NVME SSD for $40, or $35 for a sata drive. A 256 gig drive is about $10 less at about $25 and $27. A 1tb NVME drive is $60. For a little over half the price you can get 4x the storage and have space for days.
You can get a 1 TB for $80-100, or 2 TB for about $150-180. I would go with 1 TB minimum so you don’t have to micromanage the storage space.
My last ssd was 512 GB and even that would only let me keep a few games installed at a time. Much happier with 2 TB now.
That depends what games you plan to boot up. Are they the 100+GB Legendary Edition types with all the DLCs, or are they <15GB indies? If you think it could be the former now or in the future, I wouldn’t get less than 512GB (also, keep in mind that games are only getting bigger). You’ll run out of storage on the 256 faster than you think, either way, and if you’re trying to save money, there’s usually deep discounts around Christmas.
I always recommend Crucial drives, as they have been solid choices for me (I have an older MX100 that’s still going strong 10 years later). What kind of interface do you have? SATA? NVME?
Plus windows sometimes decides 100gb ain’t enough for the operation system
Don’t limit yourself to just one hard drive. Buy a cheap 128GB ssd to just stick windows on, and another drive to install your games on. You can split that third drive to be used for windows games, and the other half for Linux games. Then set up boot order to access the Linux drive first, and when you do want to boot up windows you can hit the hotkey at startup to select a different drive to boot first that one time. That way you know windows should never jack with your Linux system at all, and you don’t have to worry about anything getting messed up if you have to format one drive or the other.
This is the answer. I’ve had a 256gb SSD with nothing but Windows on it since 2018. Every time Windows starts to get a little feisty (far too often… sigh…) I just nuke the drive from orbit and spend an hour reinstalling windows rather than spending a weekend or two shuffling things around to get back to where they need to be.
Only thing that’s mildly annoying is most things expect everything to be on the C drive by default and it can be a little annoying navigating programs that don’t “remember” the last folder they looked in. But telling the boys that you have to reinstall Windows and then being back on for games the same day, definitely worth it.
