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Suggestions for a good gaming internal hard drive....
Hi
My HD is starting to act stupid. Considering the fact that it is a older drive had it before My most recent system lol long story short it has all my mp3 on it and I don't want to lose them. So Ive decided just to update to one internal drive currently im running two a Hitachi 300G drive yes dont lagh this is the very old one and a Hitachi 500 G drive. Way i figure one drive would be better then running two drives anyways. Now Im not a total noob to pc hardware I do after all maintain my own pc including replacing everything from the cpu to mem to cards big deal most ppl do this anyways but I admit I am out of touch when it comes to choosing a hard drive pls help.
Side note money is kind of a factor but im willing to pay for a decent running drive.
Thx
Comments
If you want relatively good performance for a hard drive (which is to say, not good at all, but not as bad as most hard drives), the a Western Digital Caviar Black of whatever capacity you like is pretty much the standard for enthusiasts who don't get a solid state drive.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136319
If it's just going to be used for media like MP3s, and you're not going to run real programs off of it, then performance doesn't particularly matter, so you might as well get something big, cheap, and slow like one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136847
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152245
If you want something that is actually really fast, so that you can run the OS and various programs off of it without constantly having to sit and wait for your computer to do things, then you need a solid state drive like one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227542
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227593
That's likely out of your budget, though, and doesn't seem to be what you're after.
I am interested in a solid state drive but is a 60G rather small ? How much dose Win 7 need to install? and for that matter not knowing at all about solid state drive can they run as your boot drive? If I do go this route i guess i can use all 3 drive to my advantage it seems.
60Gb is most likely enough for Windows 7 alone. But I bet mail and other stuff will go on the same drive, as well as a (extensive) swapfile. With all that, a 60Gb HDD is very small for Windows 7.
I have my Windows 7 installed on a seperate HDD, along with program files & user data (including mail and I have a LARGE mailbox with 3 private domains) and it all eats 100Gb already (drive is a conventional 7200rpm 250Gb HDD)
It depends on what you want to put on it. Data files such as videos, music, or pictures shouldn't go on an SSD. It's usually best to put the OS on the SSD, and then programs that you use a lot. Small programs such as e-mail or browsers are great. Games do get reduced loading time from being on an SSD, and in some badly coded games, running it off of the SSD will fix hitching problems. I linked both 60 GB and 120 GB SSDs. Do note that you don't actually get 60 or 120 GB of capacity. They'll really give you somewhere around 55 GB and 110 GB, respectively.
Actually, what OS are you using? Windows 7 knows what to do with an SSD, but Vista and XP can give you some issues.
I am running win 7 64 so I imagine that a 60G solid state maybe pushing it to capacity?
If you want just a big drive that performs well, try this WD Black 1tb 64meg cache for under $100
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533
normally Id recommend a velociraptor but honestly if you have $200 for a velociraptor you have enough for a SSD
This mushkin is really nice, and its 34nm.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226152
Be careful of OCZ, they recently discontinued making SSD's with 34nm substituting for 25nm and both space and performance are taking a hit for a cheaper drive. You're going to start to see their performance ratings drop because of it.
OK thanks for the good suggestions I will investigate all of them.
Cheers!!
If you are looking for an SSD for just the operating system, 40G is enough for Windows 7, but you won't have enough room left over to actually install anything large on the drive: you will have enough room for the operating system, a swap file (if you keep it on the SSD, not typically recommended), and some temporary/scratch space for other caches and stuff. Microsoft states that 20G available space is the minimum system requirement for a Windows 7 install, but there are other things that will need room as well (security patches, font caches, file caches, etc), and you need to have a bit of free space left on the drive to breath, I find 40G is about as small as you can go with an OS install and not get totally choked out.
64G is large enough for Windows 7 and possibly one, maybe two games or large applications, depending on their size.
I have a pair of 120G SSDs (one in my desktop, one in my laptop), and they are more than roomy, I could have got by with an 80G and my secondary hard drive easily (which is probably what I do when it comes time to replace them). My most full drive has Windows 7, two rather large MMOs (about 15G each), and many smaller utility programs, and I still could fit that (somewhat cramped) inside an 80G footprint.
I don't want to hijack the OP's thread but since we're talking about haddrives, I have questions myself. If I want a SSD and can't afford a standard HD right now, how hard would it be to transfer files from the SSD to a standard HD at a later time?
For example, I get a 80 GB SSD and load the OS as well as a couple games on it. Would it be possible to move these games to a standard drive at a later time? Another question, can you transfer your OS from a standard drive, if you bought one first, to a SSD?
i would recommend a 120GB SSD......thats what you need for fast disk response.
I know its kinda expensive but thats the way to go
I would go for an SSD drive as well jsut make sure its one of the latest generatino drives with matched read and write speeds. The older SSDs had crap write speeds with the latest ones thats all sorted now.
I suppose if you got the cash and can wait until the end of the month then take a look at these..
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-071-OC
New OCZ drives 500mb/s read and write speeds the current generation are aronud 250mb/s..
As for the person asknig about transfering stuff between drives... yes you can do what you want it acts just like any other harddrive so copying fiels from standard drive to an SSD is fine.. Dont get me wrong there are differences in the way the os handles things but you wont notice those so itsp ointless getting into it.
Most SSD drives now come with a 3 year warranty so no worries there i usually replace drives before 3 years anyway.. but i have been running ocz SSD drives now for about a year with no issues at all. Windows 7 boots up in 10-15 seconds and thats everythign loaded up from turning on the button to be beign able to open my first app.
Also just to note I have win 7 on a 40gb SSD drive, I have the swap file on there and basic apps and i still have about 6gb spare.
ya games are pretty safe to move around. They dont have as many registry entries as some apps have and basically windows just needs to know where it lives. Ive moved entire game folders from hard drive, to external drive, to new build hard drive and usually the only issue I have is telling the game launcher where its folder has moved to. I sometimes have to do a file check, or in most cases when I run the launcher it performs its own file check but saves a lot of time redownloading patches etc.
if the game is an MMO you might want to check your MMO's website. A lot of times if you have a registered account, under your account settings you'll have an option to download the patched client instead of reinstalling an old build and repatching via cd or dvd. Most MMO's are going this route lately.
Thanks all for shedding new info on this thread.
Performance differences between the SSDs based on either SandForce or Marvell controller aren't that big. You can certainly see a difference in benchmarks, but for real world use it's not that important. As for the OCZ Vertex 2 or Agility 2 switching to 25 nm NAND flash, the performance difference is inconsequential and you lose 4-5 GB of usable capacity, but I'd say it's worth if it you save $20.
I wouldn't wait on the Vertex 3, for several reasons. First, OCZ has a habit of announcing new products several months before release. For example, they announced the Onyx 2 last September, and it still doesn't seem to be out. I think OCZ does this as a way to say, don't buy our competitor's new product right now, but wait for what we have coming later, because it's better. So if you wait for the Vertex 3, it might come next week, or you might still be waiting when summer arrives.
Second, the "good" modern SSDs are all so fast that there's not that big of a difference between them. In the small file random reads and writes where hard drives are so slow, one SSD might be 100x as fast as a typical hard drive, and another might be 50x as fast. You'd rather have 100x as fast than 50x as fast, of course, but it's not that big of a difference. The difference between 50x as fast and 1x as fast is the big difference that you should care about.
Third, even when the Vertex 3 does launch, I'd still advise against picking one up immediately. I'd have no problem with buying a new video card at launch, and merely living with driver issues for a few months. But storage is different. Bad firmware means you could lose important data, have the computer not run well, or even have the computer flatly refuse to run at all, and then have to wait a couple of months for the company to find and fix the problem.
A lot of solid state drives have had serious firmware problems at launch, and some never did fix the problem. Sometimes even if an SSD performs very well when new, after a few months of heavy use, it gets all screwed up and is slower than a hard drive. The Crucial RealSSD C300 seemed like a great drive at launch, and then weeks later, people found that sometimes the drive gets messed up and can't go over 20 MB/s even in sequential transfers. A couple months later, Crucial figured out what was wrong and fixed the firmware. That was about 10 months ago, and there haven't been significant problems with it since then, so the firmware that the drives ship with now is demonstrably good.
That's not true of newer SSDs; the firmware might well be quite good, or it might have some showstopper problems that take some weeks to surface. That can lead to data corruption, poor performance, or even recalls--and there's no guarantee that the problems will ever get fixed. The only way to find out whether big problems will arrive after a couple of weeks or months is to wait a few months after launch and see if the early adopters run into it. That's a risk I wouldn't want to take when the real world performance benefits over year-old SSDs are so small.
ya games are pretty safe to move around. They dont have as many registry entries as some apps have and basically windows just needs to know where it lives. Ive moved entire game folders from hard drive, to external drive, to new build hard drive and usually the only issue I have is telling the game launcher where its folder has moved to. I sometimes have to do a file check, or in most cases when I run the launcher it performs its own file check but saves a lot of time redownloading patches etc.
if the game is an MMO you might want to check your MMO's website. A lot of times if you have a registered account, under your account settings you'll have an option to download the patched client instead of reinstalling an old build and repatching via cd or dvd. Most MMO's are going this route lately.
Good post, to add a bit to this:
Most games transfer very easily. 95% of the time, you can just drag and drop them across hard drives, and the only things that you need to change are any shortcuts you have to the games (like on your desktop or in the Start menu).
Operating systems, however, are not. It is possible to transfer them, but it is not an easy or uncomplicated process. Boot records have to be changed, and this can be painful at times.
Just a heads up, since this is a limited time thing (3/30):
WD Caviar Black 2T SATA 6 at Newegg just went on sale for $149.99.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136792&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-N82E16822136792-_-na-_-na&PID=3891137&AID=10521304&SID=194r0
This is pretty well the standard 7200 rpm gaming drive, and 2T of space with the SATA 6 interface.
If a hard drive wouldn't be bottlenecked at all by SATA 2, and might not even be bottlenecked by SATA 1, then SATA 3 support doesn't matter. Now, SATA 3 support isn't a bad thing, as it will work just fine and it's backward compatible. But you shouldn't say, I want this hard drive and not that one because it supports SATA 3.
The situation is, of course, totally different for solid state drives that would be bottlenecked by SATA 2, that is, ones based on a Marvell or SandForce controller. SATA 2 was a bottleneck for the first generation SandForce controllers.
Nope, I'm saying this is a good deal on this hard drive, because it's $20 cheaper than the SATA 2 version right now.
In that case, I'm all in favor of saving $20 on an equivalent hard drive.
Though I personally wouldn't be in the market for a 2 TB hard drive. Or even 250 GB.
HDD's now range from 7200rpms to 10Krpms are the usual HDD's available on the market versus the pricey 15Krpms and SSD's. for budget conscious techies, If would suggest that you get the 7200rpm or 10Krpm HDD and invest on a good Graphics Card. but for those who are all out on gaming, set the SSD as the main drive and a 1-2TB 7200rpms HDD for storage.
Just suggesting ^_^
10K RPM hard drives are way too expensive to have much of a point in consumer system anymore. If you're going to pay enough to get an SSD, you might as well just get the SSD.
I agree. The Raptor line is the only 10k+ hard drive that even comes close to consumer price levels, and those are 3-4x the price of a typical 7200rpm drive for 1/4 of the space. Sure, you get more space than you would on an SSD, but an SSD is many many times faster, whereas the Raptor line is not really all that much faster. SSD's are much better values, at least in my own opinion, than a Raptor.
There are enterprise level SAS drives that go 10-15k rpm, and those are pretty speedy, but those are also much much more expensive than any consumer level hard drive.
Agreed. Just like my poor old 15K SCSI drive, these are old technology now.
SATA is great for storing lots of data, any computer can use a 1,5 TB media drive but for system drive you need a SSD to keep with time. Anything else right now won't cut it (even if SSDs probably will be replaced in a few years by faster stuff).
Not really. Solid state drives will be good for a long time. Once storage is fast enough that it isn't a bottleneck, what use is it to have storage that is faster yet? Kind of nice, perhaps, but not a big deal. It's kind of like how being able to get 2133 MHz DDR3 memory today doesn't mean that 1333 MHz DDR3 is obsolete or even insensible to buy for a new computer.