How much space do I need on a SSD?

[cburke82]

Im thinking about getting a SSD but I like to play games and with steam most games take up around 10gb. So If I get a SSD and its say 60 GB after the install of windows 7 it will have around 40gb right? So does that mean I would have to un-install and re-install games as I was playing them? I like the Idea of better boot up and load time bu not if that means spending hours on installings games to save minutes on boot and load times.

 

[masterasia]

You could do that (uninstall-reinstall games), or you can get a raid set for your games.
Or you can shell out a couple thousands dollars and get yourself a 512GB SSD.

I do both....Uninstall/reinstall and I have a raid set and a raptor drive.
I only install the game that I'm currently playing a lot of on my SSD, otherwise it's going on the raptor or the raid.

 

[tecmo34]

^+1...

You have to consider a SSD will only provide benefit in load times of the game and not provide higher FPS. You will be fine running Steam off of a hard drive and using the SSD for OS & Apps. The ideal size for a SSD is 120GB, which gives you room for a few games without Uninstalling / Reinstalling. Also, you want to keep at least 10% free for OP (over-provision) on a SSD.

 

[cburke82]

what sort of boot time decrease will I see if it goes from 2 min to 1min its not really worth $200 bucks but is its super fast maybe?

 

[groberts101]

yeah.. you could say that SSD is super fast. You read from memory chips instead of a magnetic record player. Latency/wait time is tiny and multitasking ability is HUGE compared to HDD. It's all a cumulative effect throughout the whole usage session from boot to shutdown.

So basically, with SSD, you literally buy time. How much is your time worth?

Raided SSD does save time depending on what you do with the system. But as masterasia already said, it's very easy to get great performance with 2 smaller drives in R0 than 1 larger drive running single. With ALL SSD to date, capacity is the best defense against degradation as the trim and garbage collection algorithm built into the drives firmware can only do so much to maintain these things. Raid is nice like that(builds capacity) even though you lose trim in raided volumes.

Hope that helped understand.

 

[trnddwn33]

When I moved from a HD to an SSD, my boot time went from around 2 minutes down to around 30 seconds, half of which is mobo POST time. You can definitely notice the difference

As far as the steam games go, I do a similar setup to what you're doing. I just bought a 1TB 7200 rpm drive for all the games, never really have an issue with load times. I probably wouldn't recommend spending money on a Raptor, they don't really have much benefit over a decent 7200 rpm drive these days

 

[cburke82]

Ok so what would be the performance increase over 2 large HDD in raid? I can get 2 1TB HDD for about the same price as 1 128GB SSD?

 

[trnddwn33]

Ok so what would be the performance increase over 2 large HDD in raid? I can get 2 1TB HDD for about the same price as 1 128GB SSD?

The SSD (assuming it has a decent controller) should easily beat the 2 HDs. If you want strictly performance then go the SSD route

 

[masterasia]

Performance gains will be substantial, but to tell you the truth, I don't think it's worth it. Games perform fine on Raid or even a single 7200 rpm drive. It's your GPU you really have to worry about when it comes to games, but a fast hard drive is probably 3rd behind a fast CPU.

CPU, GPU, HDD/SSD.....don't get me wrong they're important, but you gotta make sure you system is balanced....that's key. You don't want to have an SSD and then have a cheap video card and then maybe an AMD X2 4400, you know?

 

[cburke82]

Performance gains will be substantial, but to tell you the truth, I don't think it's worth it. Games perform fine on Raid or even a single 7200 rpm drive. It's your GPU you really have to worry about when it comes to games, but a fast hard drive is probably 3rd behind a fast CPU.

CPU, GPU, HDD/SSD.....don't get me wrong they're important, but you gotta make sure you system is balanced....that's key. You don't want to have an SSD and then have a cheap video card and then maybe an AMD X2 4400, you know?

GPU..check CPU ...sort of check ....HDD ....wellll lol

 

[groberts101]

SSD will save you much time on everything you do(OS/apps GUI/game menus) until you're actually playing the game. Ultra low latency is the most perceivable difference compared to HDD. Latency generally increases with raided HDD so you will go backwards in that respect despite going up in sequential transfer performance.

SSD is worth every penny, IMHO. I'll never go back to HDD for an OS volume.

 

[cburke82]

Best answer selected by cburke82.