Benefits to separating OS and gaming resources on different drives?

[sdrob04]

Are there any general rules about how best to allocate compute vs game resources for optimum performance? 

I'm in the middle of a new build and am considering setting up my gaming resources (LaunchBox, Emulators, ROMs, etc) on a portable USB drive, entirely separate from the operating system [Windows 10 w/Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz].  I'm somewhat limited by the native hard drive capacity of this PC, which is one reason I'm considering doing this.

Assuming the portable drive is USB 3.0, is this a good or bad idea, or does it not make much of a difference?  Is this decision ultimately processor-dependent?  I'm curious to hear the pros and cons from the many PC gurus out there...

[Osirus23]

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[Zebidee]

The best thing you can do to improve performance is to make sure you use a SSD for your operating system. Booting times much faster especially. If you don't use an SSD already, then just buy one (doesn't have to be big, 120GB or 240GB is plenty) clone HDD to it with your favourite cloning software (eg Clonezilla, Aomei). Then keep your gaming resources on another hard drive, maybe one of those spare HDDs that you suddenly seem to have lying around now.

If you get a larger SSD it makes sense to partition the drive and keep your OS on smaller primary partition and gaming resources on larger partition. Then you can copy that gaming partition to a USB drive and take it where ever you like too.

In general I think a SATA III connection would be faster and more secure, but USB portability is great.

There is also eSATA

Just depends on what works for your situation.

[Phreakwars]

For portability, I just use a SATA M.2 drive in a USB 3.0 enclosure ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08H22BV1N ). USB speed will be limited not just by the USB bandwidth itself, but by the type of component that is holding the data. For instance, many people (like myself), have their Raspberry Pi's booting from an SSD drive instead of a microSD card because of the faster transfer speed.. While you won't see much difference in speed between a 2.5" SSD .vs an M.2 SATA SSD, and M.2 SATA will of course fit in a smaller space. So I say if you are looking to use a USB drive, do it right and use an SSD.