Please advise! Solid State Drive question

[Nwahs]

So I have two hard drives in my computer.  One has only Windows and SWTOR, LOTRO, and Mass Effect on there.  Pretty much just windows and video games.  It is currently 676GB free of 917GB.  

 

The other has all my "stuff"... pictures, music, movies, documents, most programs, etc.  it is currently 300GB free of 586GB.

 

 

I'm considering getting a Solid State Drive so I can have even better performance for SWTOR and my computer in general... fast loading screens, fast virus scans, etc.

SWTOR is about 45GB right now, I assume it will get as high as 100GB before the game has died.

Should I buy a 156GB SSD?  If I do, do I only put Windows and SWTOR on it?  Do I take one of the other two out of my PC tower (I'm pretty sure I have a free slot but I have to check).

 

help!

 

[Skíp]

This is relevant to my interests.  Hopefully someone more gear-savvy than I has some good insight!

[P-Rife]

I think the 128GB is the way to go from my researching.  I don't know if the SSD has much of an impact on the game end but its very beneficial to the OS.  Many things I've read say get a 64GB and only load the OS on it and use traditional drives for games and media.

[Soulless]

SSD has an impact on anything that requires extensive HD usage.  OS and gaming are two.  Your load screens between zoning will increase pretty well.

I would get a 256gb SSD and put all your games on that HD.  There are a lot of great 256gb's for under $200 now adays which is an amazing price point.  

Here is a real safe buy: http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Electronics-EVO-Series-2-5-Inch-MZ-7TE250BW/dp/B00E3W1726

 

[Nwahs]

Are they pretty easy to install?  

Anyone heard of any cyber monday deals?  I'm assuming on Cyber Monday maybe I can grab a SSD for like $100

 

On Cyber Monday I'm also going to be looking for a graphics card upgrade, although I probably don't "need" it, especially if SWTOR is my game I'm playing 99% of the time (I have a GeForce GTX 650 Ti)

 

Edit:  ya, looking at this again:  http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

I realize that my card is pretty good, no need to change.  If I ever wanted to play BF4 at highest graphics though I feel like I would need to.

[Soulless]

there will definitely be cyber monday deals, not sure what they will be though!

[(Doc)]

From my experience with a 128gb ssd and windows there is only 27gb left of freespace after you install windows. So get the 256 or larger 

[Miraluka Soran]

If you are going to go solid state you may want to consider getting 2 smaller drives and setting up a RAID1 setup rather than getting one larger drive. RAID1 allows your system to read from both drives at once in order to increase your read speeds. I'm afraid I'm not "In-the-know" enough to explain it further but from what I understand of it you still get the capacity of both drives while increasing overall read speed.

RAID0 is different it is for data backup and recovery, it writes all data in 2 places still but doesn't split the info it instead duplicates it to allow for recovery if one drive goes bad.

You can also set up RAID10 configuration which combines the 2. In this setup you wouldn't have the full capacity but would gain the recoverability and speed at the expense of space.

No matter which way you go, when dealing with the smaller SSD drives you will want to track down a program for switching your SSD loadouts, I only came across one briefly before but it handles moving your game installs from your SSD drive to your HDD and back so your active game can be run off the SSD but you don't have to completely uninstall and reinstall if you want to play another game

[Nwahs]

sounds so complicated lol.

[Wizke Sauer]

Raid isn't worth it for the negligible increase you'll see in a personal use environment.   Plus it increases your chance of failure if you stripe them... If either of the 2 drives go down you lose everything.

 

I'd get between 250-500gb depending on what you want to spend.  Current front runner for cost vs performance is the samsung evo series:

 

http://pcpartpicker.com/search/?cc=us&q=samsung+evo

 

Whole list of them there, just find the cheapest one in the size you like.  They're a lot cheaper than they used to be.

 

For reference, I have an SSD running windows and installed apps, and a second SSD that has swtor on it.  I originally had a single 128GB one and it was really close to full, so I bought a 256.  I don't need both, but I definitely went too small with the 128, and I didn't keep pictures/music/movie on that drive. 

[Muldoono]

Hi Shawn...

I hope you get a smoking deal either on Friday or Monday...  I'm kind of a bit-head when it comes to hardware so here's my two cents.

First I would go with the most space that your budget allows.  Hopefully between the deals and your budget it will be at least 128GB.  Anything less and you will probably be really tight on space and even 128 is a bit tight.  I've got 125GB used on my SSD boot drive/array and I only have Windows 8, the drivers and two games (SWTOR and SCII).

Now as far as how you maximize that space you have two options.  The single drive or two drives in a Raid 0 (Striping) configuration.  You probably won't get much of a performance boost over the single drive as Wizke pointed out, but it could be the better deal assuming your motherboard has a built in RAID driver.  So if you saw two 128GB drives that was a smoking deal over a single 256GB one I would seriously consider it.

Regardless of which option you go, make sure your Windows OS recognizes the new drive as an SSD.  Sometimes after a restore it won't recognize the change so just check the Drive Optimization tools to see what Windows thinks it is.  A fresh install should have no issues but it's always good to check.  If for some reason the media type shows as a "Hard Disk Drive" rather than a "Solid State Drive"just rerun the Windows Experience under Computer Properties and it should fix itself.  Otherwise it will never run the TRIM command and will get slightly slower over time. 

One last thought though to consider if you see some smoking deal on smaller drives and are thinking about going with a Raid 0 Boot partition.  Raid is great and has some advantages but does add a bit of complexity compared to a single drive.  You may need to Raid Driver for install if depending on if its recognized or not by Windows.  If the motherboard fails you have to find a board with the same Raid Chipset for your replacement or your Raid partition might not be recognized, which requires you to rebuild from a backup.  Also two drives creates an additional point of failure and since your using Raid 0, you will not have redundancy.  I personally think it is all manageable and have my machine on two drives in a Raid 0 configuration.  But its worth noting so you know the risks.  Here's a link to some good background info on it.

http://www.diffen.com/difference/RAID_0_vs_RAID_1

Best wishes on your deal hunting and have a great holiday break.  I'll be limited in my online time until next week as I celebrate with family as well, but I look forward to hearing what you deal you found.

Cheers, Tom

[Nicki Heat]

I work in IT.

Just remeber to keep a backup of anything on the SSD. When they fail, it is unrecoverable and catastrophic.

Anyway, Windows 7 has the ability to use an SSD to pre-cache frequently stored programs on it..

My Samsung netbook has one and boots quick.. I'm pretty sure by now, it has pre-cached some of SWTOR, although I believe that the regular patching of SWTOR kind of screws it up a lot. So it may not be too much benefit for the way my laptop works.

Could also be the low specs of the laptop too though.

[Muldoono]

Hey Shawn...

Did you get a deal?  Was just wondering how it played out for ya.

T

[Gryffon Etheras]

My .02 - I'd not reccomend buying a SSD just for SWTOR. I did, and loading times didn't take a giant nosedive. After a little investigation, turns out the largest waittime for SWTOR loading is client-server interactions, not loading textures from the HDD. Even loading your PC up with RAM and utilizing a ramdisk doesen't yield super-speedy loadtimes. I moved SWTOR back to my 7200rpm disk some time ago.

SSD's are absolutely wonderful for lots and lots of things - I love mine, but it's not a game changer for SWTOR.

[Nwahs]

Muldoono wrote:

Hey Shawn... Did you get a deal?  Was just wondering how it played out for ya. T

Nah, A. I realized I had NO money to spend on anything fun like SSDs, and B. some advice in this thread helped me realize I probably didn't need the SSD :)