Find a good therapist to talk to your friends about peer pressure.
Kidding. As far as storage goes, as you will notice from the suggested builds, your price range is smack in the middle of where some people try to fit in an SSD, sometimes this is perfectly plausible if the needs in other areas of the build aren't too high for the use case, in other situations it may require concessions that are hard to swallow on those other components. Another possible solution if you're trying to stay on the budget-friendly side for storage to prioritize other components of the build, is an SSHD or Solid-State Hybrid Drive (Current Seagate branding:
FireCuda). These drives place your most frequently accessed data on a small SSD cache for faster load-time and performance, but also have a larger spinning storage capacity so that you're still getting solid storage space bang for your buck.
If you're interested in seeing how these drives stack up, here are a couple of charts you can check out:
The first one compares startup times across several popular games on a traditional spinning 7200 RPM HDD, our SSHD, and an M.2 SSD (128GB). The white is for SSD, the orange is for our SSHD, and the gray is for the 7200 spinning HDD.
Startup Times
The next one compares the first 3 days of gaming storage utilization across several popular titles, and SYSmark ratings from various drive types and combinations. First of the grays is 7200 RPM 1TB spinning HDD, second (lightest gray) is our SSHD, third (darkest gray) is an SSD + 7200 RPM HDD combo, purple is SSD + our SSHD combo, and lastly blue is SSD.
First 3 Days Gaming Storage Utilization
Good luck with your build, regardless of which drive(s) you choose to go with in the end!
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