How should I do drive setup on my "NEW" MSI?

Mobile Tech Laptops & Netbooks
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I got an MSI GS63VR 6RF 2016 for reference here. Its still stock as near as I can tell and a neat little machine. I don’t REALLY want to keep windows on it, but at the same time rainbow 6 seige. Tough call here, so I’m thinking I’ll dual boot it till I figure out IOMMU groups and all that crap.

But… How should I setup my drives? I haven’t really thought about this sorta thing in… Gosh, 5 or 6 years? Not since high school or college, really.

ATM I have a 128GB M.2 SSD as a boot disk, and a 1TB HDD as a storage disk. I could give 40GB on the SSD to linux and the rest to windows, and then like 200GB to windows for the 5 games I care about?

I’m also thinking just buy new drives. I can’t seem to find anything for a laptop over 2TB though unless its an SSD. And I don’t have 600 bucks so thats not happening.

https://www.neweggbusiness.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9B-20-326-190&ignorebbr=1&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleBiz-PC&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleBiz-PC--pla--Solid+State+Disk-_-9B-20-326-190&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIqaXy-oyZ3wIVCAVpCh1lwAqqEAQYAyABEgLUvfD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

https://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/product.aspx?item=9b-22-178-872

Thoughts, suggestions, comments are appreciated.

Part of me wants to go out, get a 2 or 4TB external USB C hard drive, and use that as the windows storage drive. I could do that right? Or would windows explode? I have thunderbolt in the machine so anything is possible at this point.

Thanks for the ideas, machine review maybe coming soon.

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Generic windows 10 does not install to USB drives. Thunderbolt might work, dunno if Windows would have baked in drivers for Thunderbolt and the dock with a drive, or if you would have to find and load them seperatly.

For official USB boot support on windows you need Windows to Go, which only works with a limited number of expensive USB thumb drives, windows pro or up to create, and enterprise or education to run off the drive.

You may be able to use this software to boot from an external HDD, but I have not used it myself.

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I was going to boot local but store external, was the idea.

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Ah, I misunderstood.

Steam and whatnot are pretty good about having games on external drives, although it is ideal to disable autostart for any programs that access files on the external drive.

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Point these quick access Documents and Downloads and others to that external drive, although I dont know how it’ll behave when there is no external drive

Worse case would be that it’ll always reset to default and doesnt remember what you set it to,
and best would be that its just working and switching back and forth, and you can just swap externals, and sometimes even have that usb stick there

Whats good with these quick access folders is that software tend to automatically dump stuff there, and the file path doesnt break if its location changes