Questions about hard drives for gaming laptop

[Dutchos]

Hi all,

Hope you can help.

I am thinking of buying a Defiance III 15" screen laptop for gaming as my old X7200 is giving up the ghost. I am really confused about what type of hard drives to go for and in what configuration and was wondering if you might be able to help?

Basically in terms of storage needs it will be for the operating system and games and not a lot else apart from a a few bits of random software. It won't need to store videos or music to any great degree.

Are you meant to put your operating system on the HDD and then have a SDD for games or other way round and how much capacity needed for the drive 1 which i assume is a HDD and how much for the second drive which I assume is a SDD?

Many thanks for your help.

Dutchos

 

[Oussebon]

If you put one thing on the SSD, it's usually the OS. You can also put games on the SSD. It will make them load faster, though actual performance (frames per second) will be the same whether the game's on an SSD or an HDD.

People often get an SSD for the OS and their favourite games / games with the most loading screens, and an HDD for the rest.

If that's the way you want to go as well, I'd put an HDD in the "Memory - Hard Disk" slot and then get a Samsung SM961 or PM961 from the "M.2 SSD Drive" menu as they're faster than regular sata SSDs but don't cost much more. The PMs sometimes cost less actually, despite being faster.

 

[Dutchos]

Thanks very much Oussebon. What sort of sizes of drives do you think necessary for the a) HDD and the b) SDD for my purposes? is 5,400rpm ok for the HDD?

 

[Oussebon]

A popular combo is 240/256 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD, but really it depends on how much you want to put on the SSD and how much you're willing to spend.

256gb is a respectable size for an SSD, though if may fill up quickly if you think that some modern games can easily be 50gb. If I had the money I might be inclined to get the 512gb PM961 and a 1TB HDD.

The 5400rpm HDD is fine - not least because the configurator doesn't seem to have an option for a 7200rpm 1TB HDD at the moment (I feel sure it used to...). It's not lightning fast, but it'll do.