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Advice on 500gb or 1TB internal hard drive for gaming, or get another SSD?
hi all im running i5-3570k with 8gb ram and asrock extreme 4 mobo currently have a crucia 128gb SSD but finding i am needing more space for my gaming. can any suggest a good internal hard drive in the 50-100$ range that i can use for my extra gaming needs? or should I go with another SSD? thanks
Comments
Solid State Drives are best used for their performance, not storing files you won't be using. I would start by removing games you don't actively play. Remove downloaded files that you don't need, as well. I know 128GB isn't much space, but you can work with it.
If you do feel the need to back up old files and games, get a mechanical drive with 500+ GB of space. In many cases, you can store the game's large data files on the mechanical drive, then copy them back over to your SSD if you decide to play that game again in the future. This method has a good chance of saving you from spending hours to redownload many games.
SSDs are expensive per GB, compared to mechanical drives. As an owner of both a 120GB and 240GB SSD, I understand the desire for more space. The 120GB SSD is in my laptop, and I feel like it is just barely enough, while the 240GB SSD gives me time to be lazy between uninstalling games I don't play.
If you are using all of that space for games you play everyday then definitely another SSD. When it comes to gaming, a SSD is a big performance jump over standard drives.
If your SSD is filled with many non-games or games you rarely every play then just get a cheap 500 gb drive and move all the non-games/rarely played games (or minimal games that don't use many resources so don't need the performance of an SSD) to the new drive.
Sound advice from above me OP.
Meaning Snarlingwolf.
Snarlingwolf pretty well has the right of it.
If you only have the 120G SSD, that would be fairly tight for space.
If you have 120G SSD + 1T spare drive, you have all the space in the world.
mklink makes it very easy to swap files back and forth
$50-100 budget makes me lean toward recommending a 1T base drive - WD Blue or something similar fits right in that budget, provides heaps of space, and should work out ok as long as your not adverse to copying/linking files back and forth as needed.
You could get another 120G SSD for around $100, but even 2 120G SSDs will end up getting tight for space eventually.
Hey OP.
If you need room, it says itself that a HDD is better off then an SSD.
In average performance on games you play less, it shouldn't really bother you so much to put them on a HDD.
The games you play all the time you keep on your SSD. Especially those that improves a lot from being on an SSD.
Personally I would recommend link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533
Western Digital Black, 64MB Cache, 7200RPM, 3.5", 1TB
The 1TB version is just as fast as the 500GB one is for the WD Black.
It's one of the fastest normal HDD's around, decent price.
Just my opinion on the matter.
The people and the friends that we have lost, and the dreams that have faded, never forget them~
As for a WD Blue vs a Black, I suppose the differences aren't that big but, this text has been taken from a hardware forum.
"The black is significantly faster than the blue in all tasks and is a far more reliable drive. Also they cross ship black drive but not blues. meaning you call today with a bad drive and they put the new one in the mail that day and you have 30 days to return it. The blue they wait to receive it before shipping a new one to you."
Though it must be stated that with a HDD, the differences you'll see aren't THAT darn great, you'll get a few percent better performance in optimized tasks when using the Black vs the Blue, if that is worth it, is simply up to each induvidual.
For me though, I like having the most performance I can get, even how minor it is.
Ok that's me signing out! Hope at least you got some insight from my posts.
I won't be back to read this thread again.
The people and the friends that we have lost, and the dreams that have faded, never forget them~
Comparing the speed of mechanical drives is like comparing the speed of turtles when you have a Ferrari for a SSD. Mass storage is not worth the extra investment for 5% speed differences, in my opinion.
Sorry, but this is just not true. Loading times being reduced significantly by a SSD is a major improvement in performance. When I zone into a dungeon in Rift, I'm usually the first one in and waiting a minute or so for everyone else. Those minutes add up to hours per week of waiting at loading screens.
In addition to faster load times, the SSD can improve texture loading time when moving through a game world. In poorly-optimized games, mechanical drives usually cause hitching, or slight pauses in the framerate, when loading textures. Using a SSD nearly eliminates hitching.
2 mechanical drives, 1 1 Tb Caviar Black and 1 500 gb caviar black which coupled with the ivy league i5 I have lets me load into most MMOs first with top level graphics. Only a few very demanding online games such as War Thunder on maximum settings, full screen at 1600x1200 will cause a slowdown in loading and this is due to my GPU being a 2010 era best quality/price card.
SSDs currently do not provide any significant boosts to performance in loading times for games, that's the CPU's job and speaking from personal experience: if you're load times are too long it's time for a new CPU.
Couldn't agree more. Aion was a classic for this. As other faction players approached there would be a quick hitch as it loaded the skins. For the observant it was almost like an alarm, as well stealthed players would sometime be revealed as it loaded their skins.
How much difference an SSD makes varies wildly from one program to the next. See, for example:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-rift-ssd,3062-12.html
As Ridelynn mentioned, it makes a huge difference whether you already have an SSD and just want more fast storage, or whether you have an SSD only and primarily need more total storage. So which is it?
Couldn't be more misguided. Sorry, this is flat wrong.