MilfyMuffins

Honorable
Apr 22, 2012
14
0
10,510
When im making a new pc on CyberPowerpcs theres an option for Primary hard drives, Data hard drives and SSD, i'm looking to make a okay Gaming pc do i need the two others, or just a primary HD?
 

ebola28

Distinguished
Dec 27, 2011
380
0
18,810
you only need a primary... depending on your budget, you can go with a SSD as a primary and HDD and data for faster load times, or to save money, you can go with a HDD only.

The single HDD option will have both your OS as well as the place you save everthing, like a typical PC does.
 

Paperdoc

Polypheme
Ambassador
Just a Primary Hard drive is all you need. Your Operating System and all application software and data can be put there. A Data hard drive is just a second drive that does NOT have the Operating System on it, but can have anything else, in case you need more storage space.

SSD stands for Solid State Drive. It is a device made from all solid state memory just like RAM, but set up in a container with some smarts and connectors so it installs and behaves just like a hard drive. Its advantage is that it is VERY fast because it does not have any rotating mechanical parts to wait for. But it is VERY expensive per GB, and you can't get huge ones like hard drives. Some people who want really fast performance (gamers among these) use HDD's to install their Operating System and several key applications (like games and their data), but there's a real limit on how many games you can load onto an SSD unit with a fixed size.

Among Gamers, some people promote use of RAID0 arrays of hard drives (usually 2) for faster performance. These days, individual hard drives are almost as fast as a RAID0 pair, but an SSD is MUCH faster than that. RAID0 has one big potential drawback - if one of the pair of drives in the array fails, you lose EVERYTHING on that RAID0 array. If you don't have a very recent backup, you have a long task to re-load everything after you replace the failed drive, and you will not be able to re-create some things.