SSD For Gaming

[Deadbolt]

Cheers for the tips so far.

What are the benefits of choosing a Hybrid drive over a SSD or HDD?

[watercooled]

For a gaming drive, possibly not much.

The idea is they fit somewhere in between cost and performance-wise, however they achieve this by adding a fairly small SSD cache to a HDD - for an everyday system e.g. booting, opening smaller apps etc, it's probably a good thing.

However gaming isn't really suited to their caching model - the algorithms try to keep frequently-accessed data in the cache but that would be infeasible for many games with huge amounts of frequently-accessed data so you might find yourself simply reading at HDD speeds most of the time.

[directhex]

WD Reds are specifically tuned for NAS - they avoid spinning down, meaning they're more at risk of damage from shocks and consume more power in low-usage situations than alternatives (e.g. Green), but will respond ~instantly when called upon.

[shaithis]

WD Reds are specifically tuned for NAS - they avoid spinning down, meaning they're more at risk of damage from shocks and consume more power in low-usage situations than alternatives (e.g. Green), but will respond ~instantly when called upon.

and have a 3 year warranty

[watercooled]

So do the Blues?

[shaithis]

So do the Blues?

Green - 2 Years
Blue - 2 years
Red - 3 Years
Purple - 3 Years
Black - 5 Years

You can buy an extra year for a small fee also.

[watercooled]

Ah, seems it's the retail drives which get a 3 year warranty: http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp

Still, not something I'd be overly bothered about TBH, especially when considering the extra cost and that they're NAS-targeted drives.

Weirdly WD don't seem to do a 2TB Blue anyway?

[shaithis]

I expect 2TB drives to be going EOL, the 1.5TB drives did well over a year ago.

[watercooled]

The max they do is 1TB. And it would be daft to EOL <2TB, >1TB are multi-platter drives and the smallest drives on the market are generally single-platter drives which would be 1TB now. Smaller drives can either use less-dense platters or possibly part-enabled/single-head drives.

[AGTDenton]

Have to agree with Scaryjim.
Games the size of Watch Dogs, FarCry and possibly GTA V (when released) might benefit from SSD as they are constantly saving data as you move around the map. However, I've not had any major issue using standard HDD's with games like these.

I've got my OS + drivers on SSD OCZ Vectors and data on Barracuda HDD drives, I've optimised my OS to use HDD for temp files and stuff - this keeps the SSD from clogging up and unnecessary usage.

I'd personally keep to a strategy of separating OS from Data. Whether its HDD's or a mixture of SSD+HDD