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Does it matter what hard drive I get for gaming PC? SSD or standard
I have a 128gb crucial m500 ssd going for my gaming computer. but i find that i quickly filled it up with games. for storing and playing games does it matter what hard drive i use? i was thinking about getting another ssd but if it doesnt matter i was gonna just get this hard drive. plz let me know what u think or if u know a better hard drive to suggest. thx
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005T3GRNW/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
Comments
I use an SSD for my boot / operating system drive and it's the way to go if you can afford it. If you're looking for a better cost per GB ratio for your games drive can I suggest using a hybrid drive as an alternative. Here's the 1TB version.
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Desktop-Solid-Hybrid-ST1000DX001/dp/B00EIQTOFY
I just bought the 2TB version to replace a 750GB hybrid drive
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Desktop-Solid-Hybrid-ST2000DX001/dp/B00EIQTKAS
Yes and no. SSDs will speed up load times, but won't affect overall performance. So if you're in a game with lots of loading screens, then it's useful. If the environments are seamless, then it's less important.
However! There are cases where you are throttled too. This goes a little way back, but my buddy had an SSD playing SWTOR and there was a 1 or 2 pixel gap at the top of his screen where he could actually see stuff going on behind the loading screen (it was loaded) but the loading screen itself stayed on top for a while even though it was technically loaded.
Another consideration is games like Planetside 2 or any other PvP experience. Generally, these games depend on the slowest load, so being first isn't really any advantage. It's not like you just drop into the environment and can start killing people before they even load.
So I think that if you're mindful of what you put on your SSD I think you'll find that you should have enough space.
Crazkanuk
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I haven't talked to anyone with an SSD who hasn't been completely sold on them after getting one. There is a combination of people who install a game on the SSD, and uninstall to play something else, and people who just use the regular drive to run their games. Both sets of people are completely sold on SSDs.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I bought a 1TB HD to go with my 256GB SSD, I put stuff that I do not care if it is a little faster, or that I do not play a ton on the HD, stuff I play a lot goes on the SSD. I have my Civ IV the HD, and my wife has hers on the SSD, we have the exact same computer and I can tell a pretty good difference in load times and such, it is my only comparison though, and I doubt Civ IV benefits a ton from it, after load.
You need 2 ssds one for windows one for games .This will speed up ure pc and ure games as well becouse as the mmos load in the background the ssd will do it very fast u will see the difrence once you start pc .
Where normal hd will have to roll the disc up to speed to read dont know the english proper name for this so sorry ,
If u can afford it its way to go normal hdds are good for storage nothing else.
Normal hd sucks hard once u know how the ssd works
I am the punishment of God...
If you had not committed great sins,
God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you
Genghis Khan
My setup is very similar to this.
128Gb SSD for OS
128Gb SSD for Games only (really wish I had gone 256Gb+ tbh)
500Gb Normal hard drive to store music / pictures on etc.
Since moving my games onto SSD they just load sooooooooooo much faster
SSD are faster to load, but smaller and more costly.
Normal hard drives are slowerto load, cheaper, and larger.
RAM drives are extremely fast, small and costly.
I have found that the proper mix of all three of these allows for a wide range of cost/performance. RAM drives are often overlooked, but offer the best performance for key applications. I even run some VM with the OS on the RAM drive for optimul performance.
There is no artificial throttling going on to prevent you from loading faster. The issue with SWTOR as well as other MMOs is that there is more to load than you can get off your hard drive. Remember the "online" part of MMO? The server needs to tell the client what is around it. If that server isn't very fast, or your bandwidth isn't fast, your loading times for that game may slow down.
OP: It sounds like you need to pick a game or two and stick with them. After you beat the games or are done playing them, uninstall. Don't try to hoard games and don't install/uninstall too often as that can wear out your SSD faster.
You bought the SSD because you heard it improves performance, which is true. A mechanical drive has seek times of ~10ms and has raw read rates topping out around 1Gbps. The SSD has almost no seek time and some can nearly max out a SATA 6Gbps connection. Going back to a mechanical drive will make your games feel sluggish to load and less responsive when they need to load something on-the-fly instead of at a loading screen.
You could get another SSD (128 or 256 GB) and use it for games. You could get a mechanical drive for backing up games you aren't actively playing so you can re-install faster. You could just live with what you have and not try to hold on to games you aren't actively playing.
Don't buy a hybrid drive. They don't work any better than a plain mechanical drive for gaming.
Did you fill up the SSD with games that you actively play? Because if you only play one game at a time but don't want to delete old games in case you want to come back to them in a few months, you could buy a big hard drive and move the games you're not actively playing to the hard drive, then move them back to the SSD when you want to play them.
If you're not going to load a game, it doesn't matter how fast it would have loaded.
If you have 16GB of ram then the only thing it affects are loading times. Otherwise repeated data will be in Ram. Will only have to load once.
Another consideration could be using a raid setup. Most newer motherboards support up to raid 10. But a simple Raid 1 would give you plenty of speed. With the reliability of today's hard drives you could spend the same money on a raid 10 setup as a single SSD and get WAY more storage.
No
is your ssd connected by wireless to a tomb next door ?
if so how thick is the lead before you photon emiiter goes dull ?
I accept the quantum is old.
Barnabus Collins
For storing games, no it really doesn't matter what drive you use.
For playing games, it greatly matters what drive you use.
Get whatever is cheapest in a capacity you need for a bulk data drive. Just be prepared to copy whatever you aren't using to that drive, and back again to your SSD when you want to play it. You could play some non-intensive stuff off your data drive fine, but you will definitely notice a difference.
lol I got 4 hard drives and wish to have a couple more
The 1TB SSDs keep coming down in price -- I saw one at $420 recently -- at that level it is hardly worth buying a new gaming PC with a hard drive unless you are a videophile or somesuch.
Upgrading to SSD on the other hand is less useful...
A RAID 1 or 10 is silly to use for gaming purposes. You don't need fault tolerance like that on a strictly gaming rig. Only businesses should be considering a RAID 1 or 10. If you do need some sort of backup for a few essential files, there are plenty of online services for that kind of thing.
Also, a RAID 1 wouldn't give you any extra speed. I suspect you meant RAID 0 if you thought it would give you extra speed. However, RAID 0 wouldn't give you any significant performance increase in gaming. Sure, it doubles the sequential read rate, but the issue with mechanical drives and gaming is that the data being requested is rarely sequential and the seek times are what causes the significantly slower loading speeds when compared to SSDs.
A RAID 1 is mirrored, 0 is striped, and 10 is at least four disks with two RAID 0's that are mirrored.
I was going to suggest this very thing.
Although 500gig SSDs have really gone down in price and you can find sales on them quite often.
I personally have my OS on one of my SSD (with the fixed swap file on a separate SSD) and then I have another SSD dedicated to the games I'm playing.
Then I have a couple of (rapidly aging) platter drives (2tb) for everything else. Since I require a great deal of space for what I do, i have been considering a couple of those hybrid drives. Seagate is a good HD company.
In the last 6 months, 3 of my old platter drives have gone bad. I know it's just a matter of time but I still wasn't prepared for the first and third one. I lost years of data (All were WD Blacks). I realize this is my own fault. Hell I have a BD Burner, cloud drives, etc at my disposal for backup. I could have even bought another 3 tb's and used it/them for dedicated backup.
I guess this is just my way of warning folks that have had their platter drives for a good while now - And/or used them as frequently and as hard as I do. Back your important data up and replace those drives *before* they fail on you.
I wasn't trying to derail your thread here.. I just wanted to include a warning about the aging platter drives. Especially ones made by Western Digital, if you use them hard like I do.
Seagate's "hybrid" hard drives are a waste of money for gaming, especially if you already have an SSD. They only have a token amount of NAND flash, so barely any of your data benefits from the speed boost. And even then it's only a read cache, so write speeds don't benefit in the slightest.
You can get impressive results from them in lab tests if there's some small amount of data that you read often. But if that's the case, just put that data on the SSD and it will be faster yet.
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RAID arrays rarely make sense for consumer use.
RAID 1 is good for extreme reliability needs, so that even if a drive fails entirely, the computer keeps running just fine. But that's a waste of money for most consumers, as you're probably better off just backing up the data you care about, and accepting that your computer will be out of commission briefly while you replace a failed drive.
RAID 0, on the other hand, is just bad news all around outside of certain peculiar uses like recording uncompressed video. SSDs are so fast that the extra speed of RAID 0 simply doesn't matter in the real world. Meanwhile, you at least double your chances of data loss, as either drive failing means your data is gone. There is also the potential for hiccups in the RAID array to wreak havoc.
There is also RAID 5 and RAID 6, but you need a discrete RAID controller to do those properly, which generally makes no sense for consumer use whatsoever.
I am running with combat logging on in EQ2 and switching to a SSD did improve my performance somewhat. Playing a game without logging it's main advantage is loading screen time. It's really nice being the first person in the raid to zone into a instance most of the time. I moved ESO from a traditional hard drive to SSD between beta 2 and 3 and noticed a pretty large difference in general time to load up the game and time to zone but didn't really notice better frame rates.
I have a 500GB SSD for my OS and actively played games and a couple TB's of other traditional disk for everything else and really believe it was worth the cost.
Bit of advise. If you go SSD for your boot disk turn on AHCI in the BIOS before you install Windows. It makes a significant difference in SSD performance but tt's a bit of a pain after the fact and can cause blue screens.
On my main computer, I have a standard 1TB HDD, and a 250GB SSD. Not all games see much improvement with the SSD, so I just install everything to the HDD by default. I then move the install folder over to the SSD and create a symlink to it. If the game doesn't improve enough to justify the space, I just delete the symlink and move the data back over.
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