SSD for gaming

[EvanJackPenn]

Hello,

I'm looking at building a gaming system soon, and I think I have a reasonable budget - around 1k. I have been considering getting a SSD for a boot/apps drive. I was considering having a few games on it too, such as new realeases like Skyrim etc. Is that silly? I know it won't give an FPS boost or anything, but I've never had an SSD and so I'm likely to feel the improvements. As for size, I guess games would take a rather lot of space. However, I've been living with a 60GB HDD for about 4 years now - I'm good at being space savvy.

Is there anything in particular I need to look for? I would think that read speeds would be my priority, as opposed to writes, but I'm no expert Should I be looking at a Sandforce or something else? I'm looking at either the Crucial M4 or the Corsair Force at 128GB/120GB. Are these two different in game performance?

I am then looking at getting a 2TB mass storage. Of course, I'll have the majority of my games on here. Should I get something like a 'green' 5400/5900 RPM drive, or would that be meh?

Excuse the blurrghh of words, they just come out!
Thanks

[vinnyT]

Hi, I'm pondering the same situation as you, and have decided to get a Crucial M4 128GB drive (Sandforce seems to be having issues at the moment) as this will give me plenty of room for os, apps and 2-3 large games.

like you I have been getting on with a mechanical drive so just about any ssd will show lots of improvement.

[Hicks12]

Right my suggestion, avoid Sandforce like the plague as its all marketing crap and not as reliable as others.... speed is good if you dont fill the drive and shove it with loads of compressible data.


What i would recommend is a crucial m4 drive or alternatively maybe an intel drive, the m4 i just solid in terms of durability, the tests on how much data can be written is surpassing sandforce by loads and it will last you ages without hassle (obviously all drives can have problems, even hard drives so thankfully you have the warranty same as hdd ).

I currently have a 60gb sandforce corsair f60 drive as my main boot and a newish crucial c300 128gb as my games drive, aint filled it up yet but its performing well (my motherboard is so terrible its essentially capped my drive at 100mb/100mb!Cant wait to upgrade). Prefer c300 to f60, not sure if its just the OS causing it but i find alot of things installed on the f60 stutter and the c300 is just smooth.

Id say get something like:
60gb SSD boot drive / 128gb Boot+Game+some aps drive
500gb/1tb fast drive i.e a samsung F3
1tb+ green drive.

Not sure how you will use the storage as you say youve lived with 640gb for ages (i was like that until i had 2tb in my rig haha) but basically use the ssd for priority stuff/most used and then add in the rest of the games/less used applications on the f3 and then use the low power drive for storage as it will be slower than the rest but use less power.

Also note that the larger crucial drive you get the fast the write speeds are (i believe this is because of the way it writes in parallel and has more nand chips to write to at once) with the 128gb write is like 180mb or something (double check) which is way faster than a normal HDD anyways which is a nice thing since well you want the SSD to be acceptable in all areas, the better areas are ofc the access time of like .2MS compared to 11ms on a HDD and multiple IPO are like 100x better than a hdd.

You will notice the difference big time, personally think its worth it but dont skimp out on the overall build just to have one. If your budget is getting close then really just have a look at a smaller drive primarily for a boot drive + office + couple of other things. I have got a 40gb intel drive in my laptop (no other drives, havent bought mount to turn dvd drive into hard drive yet lol) and have windows 7 + office 2010+ microsoft Visual studios which is quite big and i have like 7GB left always.

[EvanJackPenn]

I'm not all that sure about buying two HDDs. My budget is already stretched to £1200. It comes down to size/speed really. Do I get a slower 2TB one, or a faster 1TB one... Or should just get a smaller SSD for boot only and run games on a 7200RPM? :S

[BerZerk]

Am currently using 2xOCZ Vertex 2 60GB RAID0 as Windows boot and 1xOCZ Vertex 2 60GB for L4D2! You can't believe how fast the game load for the next map

[TheodanUK]

How about a 1.5TB Caviar Black for about £5 more than a "GREEN" 2TB drive.. so lose 500mb of storage but get 7200rpm which I would prefer if I was loading games from the drive regularly. At that price (under £60) you could even buy 2, raid0 them and have 3TB of speedy game storage on top of an awesome boot SSD drive :---)

Boot drive I would snag either a Vertex 3 or Crucial M4 (120gb) depending on how much belief you have in sandforce drives.

If you use STEAM then you would have to use "junctions" to move the games onto different drives, unless you install all of them on one or the other drive... (which is one reason why i would rule out a small SSD boot drive personally).

[Gomezie]

Get some SSD's in a raid 0.. youll never look back

[CivilDrone]

Nothing wrong with having your favourite games on ssd, i am using corsair force 3, reviews weren't the best for it, but i can't see anything wrong with the drive. I got starcraft 2, world of tanks and day of defeat source on ssd, few programs and win7, still got some space left over for the likes of skyrim i didnt go for crucial simply becouse write speeds are a joke. corsair on the other hand is pretty good, as i tend to format my drive at least once a week

[EvanJackPenn]

For mass storage I was looking at these:
2TB Western Digital WD20EARX Caviar Green Quiet
2TB Hitachi CoolSpin 5K3000
2TB Seagate Barracuda Green
2TB Samsung Spinpoint F4EG

If I was going for a 7200, it'd have to be this:
2TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000

Thanks