SSD or HDD

[Dene76]

Hi,

My rig is currently on the 3rd working day and I was wondering whether or not to swap my 1st HDD from a 500gb Velociraptor to a 120/240gb SSD?
This drive will only hold the OS and standard programs while games will go on my 1TB Velociraptor 2nd HDD.

Comments appreciated.

Cheers
Dene

[Turtle]

Well i usually make a pros and cons lis to decide .

HDD

Pros: Lots of space, Reliable and very cheap £/gb.

Cons: Slow, Louder than SSD by hearing the drive spinning.

SSD

Pros: Very fast performance, Very quiet, Uses low power

Cons: Very very expensive £/gb ratio. Less storage space available. Rumours of it being less reliable through excessive use.

Hope this helped.

[Wozza365]

An SSD will be lightning fast compared to any hard drive (including velociraptors)

I think in general, the velociraptors are overpriced, you would be better off with a caviar black and a SSD cache drive, although im unsure if they work on secondary drives, you would need to phone PCS about that

A good setup would be 240gb SSD 1st drive, 1TB Caviar Black w/ 20GB SSD Cache (or a bigger SSD cache, for improved performance), if it works, if not just go for a standard caviar black, i imagine the difference between it and the velociraptor isnt much as the caviar black has double the cache

[tom_gr7]

I'd go for a 60 or 120gb ssd and a 1 or 2tb caviar black drive.

[mishra]

If you go with SSD just make sure you will not install Steam into the "default" location :P as you will ran out of storage in first week!
I still claim that SSD is an enthusiast hardware. It's nice if you know how to get full potential of such drive. If you know little about PC and you just want to play games, listen to music, browse catz on the internet... normal HDD is just fine.

Simply what tom_gr7 said (if money allow), get SSD as main drive and HDD as a second, but from day one be aware what are you installing and where!
If you are not so confident, just forget it.. nothing wrong in HDDs at all!

[danielw2599]

I gaurentee once you go SSD you will never go back! I have a 120GB vertex 3 as my main drive, 1TB caviar black as general purpose and a 256GB Samsung 830 for games. Well worth the investment IMO.

[_Francesco_]

SSD
Rumours of it being less reliable through excessive use.

From what I've read, this is more so applicable to HDD. Makes sense if you think about it since HDD comprise of moving parts while SDD doesn't.

Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than myself can clarify either way, but I've been under the impression ever since learning about them that SSDs have a much lower failure rate / higher reliability rating than HDDs.

If you go with SSD just make sure you will not install Steam into the "default" location :P as you will ran out of storage in first week!

How come?

[Wozza365]

How come?

Because modern game files are huge, some being over 20gb, not including any DLC, so just ten games will be well over 100GB

[danielw2599]

From what I've read, this is more so applicable to HDD. Makes sense if you think about it since HDD comprise of moving parts while SDD doesn't.

Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than myself can clarify either way, but I've been under the impression ever since learning about them that SSDs have a much lower failure rate / higher reliability rating than HDDs.

Believe the reason being there is a finite amount of times the sectors on the drive can be written to and over. Not worth worrying about to be honest.

[_Francesco_]

Believe the reason being there is a finite amount of times the sectors on the drive can be written to and over. Not worth worrying about to be honest.

Ah, I see. Isn't writing and overwriting happening constantly, though? Never heard of that before, so thank for clarifying.