Is an SSD meant only for an OS and programs/games or are there other things that could benefit from being stored there?

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Steven Mal

Steven Mal

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Jun 8, 2013
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I'm under the impression that an SSD is meant to store an OS for fast boot-up and applications/programs so that they start-up/load faster but are there any other things that can benefit from being stored on an SSD? Is it true that storing games on an SSD means that they will only start-up and load faster, but not perform better?

I'm trying to figure out how big of an SSD and HDD I need for my new gaming laptop.

TLDR: Am I correct to say that an SSD is for the OS, applications/programs and games, and the HDD is for images, music, and videos?


 
Solution
digitaldoc
Yes, you are correct. The SSD is for the OS, and software that you use frequently. There is really no point to storing your music or photos on the SSD, and they are fine on the HDD.

You should get an SSD of 240 to 256 GB, which will give you more than enough room for the OS, and also be affordable.
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kanewolf

kanewolf

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Generally the cost per GB for an SSD made them impractical for video and music storage. The sweet spot for SSDs in early 2015 is the 256GB range. That is large enough that you don't have to watch them like a hawk but not too expensive to break the budget.

Games won't generally perform much differently when being loaded from an SSD. Different levels or different maps would load faster but your FPS generally won't increase.

Things that could benefit from SSD --
e-mail storage, especially if you keep a lot of e-mail and need to search it.
Programs you run frequently.

You want to stay below 80% full on an SSD for optimum performance.
 
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digitaldoc

digitaldoc

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Yes, you are correct. The SSD is for the OS, and software that you use frequently. There is really no point to storing your music or photos on the SSD, and they are fine on the HDD.

You should get an SSD of 240 to 256 GB, which will give you more than enough room for the OS, and also be affordable.
 
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Solution
Justin Millard

Justin Millard

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Nov 22, 2014
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Yes, you have a good grasp of this.

Honestly, loading times in games are mostly great unless its something that takes several minutes to pre-load everything to get started. Sims 3 is the only game I can think of that massively benefits from an SSD as you can load the whole game in the first few minutes and never see a loading screen for the rest of the game.

If you create professional video an SSD is also great for working with those large file sizes and gives everything a nice bit of speed. Mostly though, a good hard drive will do you well.

SSDs help a lot with transfers of very large files if you do that a lot.

128GB SSD with just the OS, and everything else placed on the hard drive works well. Loading times for most things on just an internal hard drive are always very good for me with the way I use my computer. I only ever notice things going slow when I back up to my external hard drive over USB, and its mainly USB 3 that is the bottleneck there and not my hard drives.

Be careful with over filling SSDs as its harder to free up space on an over-filled SSD compared to a hard drive which easily writes over its old data. Also be warned that file sizes will become slightly bigger once moved to an SSD as they tend to save things in 64kb blocks instead of 4kb blocks.

128GB is easily enough for years of holding the OS, but if you think you will fill it more than half way right from the start then go another size up.
 
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