Solid State Hard Drive

[Lemur]

Here's a serious question: Let's say I get a smallish SSD because that's what I can afford. Now, most of my work on the PC is in MS Office, with the occasional excursion into DreamWeaver and GIMP2. In other words, my everyday work is not hard on the computer.

The place where I tax my computer is, of course, games.

So which would give me a more sexually satisfying experience:

1. Install Steamapps on the ssd?
2. Or boot from the SSD?

Let's assume for the sake of argument that I can't do both comfortably.

[Furunculus]

depends on what smallish means?

mine are what i consider smallish at 128GB, i.e. too small for my currently installed steam games (~350GB).

however, seeing as you can now get a 256GB SSD for just £124:
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/240gb...oogle+shopping

i would consider have a few less games installed for the privelage to super speedy load times.

[Lemur]

So you would go with putting Steam on the SSD, rather than booting from it?

As of today my entire Steam folder is sitting at approx 104 gigs. So it would fit comfortably on a 256 drive, and still have plenty of room for a re-install of, say, Skyrim + mods.

Has anybody tried both scenarios? Booting from an SSD versus Steam on the SSD?

[CBR]

If you have enough room for games on the SSD you might as well go for that. I think it will only benefit loading times though. For some games that might give an edge, as in FPS where you want to pick a class/weapon before the majority pops up (Red Orchestra)

[Furunculus]

agreed, at 104GB you have room to have your OS and games on a 240GB drive, and still leave 10% for sector reallocation.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Uh Furunculus, that 10% is usually taken into account already.

[Husar]

I was thinking about the same, ideally I could get two, one for Windows and one for some games. If you don't want to play all your 500Gb of Steam games all the time at once you can also shuffle their folders around between your Steamapps folder and a normal storage HDD without having to redownload them.

I guess in my case the SATA 300 on my mainboard would be a bottleneck but still a lot faster than booting stuff from an HDD, right?
And would it be better to get two 128GB SSDs or one 256GB and partition that in half? Any advantages of having them connected to different SATA connectors or seperation in case of failure etc?

[Furunculus]

Uh Furunculus, that 10% is usually taken into account already.

i didn't think it was so clear-cut as that, and as a result have built in a margin for error:
http://forums.anandtech.com/archive/...t-2157941.html
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtop...f=11&t=1139565

[naut]

I have two 128GB in raid. It is pretty swish. After Win7 install I had 220GBish free space, so plenty to play around with. My only complaints would be that stability is a little less than 100%. Occasionally upon restart Win7 fails to load certain things (like AMD's CCC) or hangs in loading. Although, this is probably my fault as I run a very stripped Win7 with most unnecessary services disabled (gotta get the most performance possible!) not directly the SSDs or raid.

The other issue I had was with virtual memory. Obviously you do not want virtual memory using the SSD as it will kill the life expectancy of the drive massively. Win7 gets a little pissy if the virtual memory is reallocated to a volume other than the "C:" drive. You might have to check that Win7 has applied and maintains this change.

Here's a serious question: Let's say I get a smallish SSD because that's what I can afford. Now, most of my work on the PC is in MS Office, with the occasional excursion into DreamWeaver and GIMP2. In other words, my everyday work is not hard on the computer.

The place where I tax my computer is, of course, games.

So which would give me a more sexually satisfying experience:

1. Install Steamapps on the ssd?
2. Or boot from the SSD?

Let's assume for the sake of argument that I can't do both comfortably.

Personally I have Steam on the SSDs and use "mklink /J" to link the actual folders to my main hard drive. I like this set up because Steam is notorious for not liking being installed on any volume other than the "C:" volume. Also Steam installs to the SSD which invariably means a quicker download and install times. For games that are read/write intensive I leave them where they are (Crusader Kings II for example). All other games I copy to my non-SSD "E:" volume under "\Games" and then use the "mklink /J" command to "trick" Steam into believing the files are still on the "C:" volume. For example:

mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\saints row the third" "E:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\saints row the third"

The folder structure doesn't need to reflect Steam on the other drive like mine does. For my own mental clarity I left the Steam folder structure the same on the "E:" volume. I have other non-game related folders similarly linked.

After moving and linking you can check which folders are linked and which are physically on the "C:" volume by looking in properties, linked folders should be 0KB in size if done correctly.

The only problem I have encountered is Valve Source games which do not use a folder structure, such TF2. These games usually use .gcf files directly in the "steamapps" folder. You could move and link the entire "steamapps" folder or try "mklink /H" to link the files individually. I could not get it to the "mklink /H" command to work and left them as is. They are only 4GB or so on out of 240GB, so no big loss.

[Lemur]

Hmm. So judging by the responses, best thing would be to save up and get an SSD expansive enough to host both the C: functions and steamapps.

It's all good. I will bide my time, and seethe with anger and envy at those who have SSDs in the meantime.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Aww come'on: $180 or so buys you a perfectly usable 256GB of SATA-6 SSD goodness. I mean compared to graphics/CPU upgrades that's pretty good value/money proposition. So, say, 20GB to Windows on C, should be more than enough leaves you just shy of 240GB of space to play with for games. I set up a VM with a promo copy of Office Enterprise 2007 from back when MS was angling for ribbon buy in from corporate, and a bells + whistles copy of Visual Studio (itself a 1GB or so download, before installation) in less than 20GB ... so how hard can it be if all you want is a bit of light office, browsing + Steam?

Alternatively, buy lots of RAM and look to Windows to cache directories for you.

But lots of RAM + SSD is still lots better. Especially with laptops: no spinning parts (cats might decide to hunt your power cord, children/idiot relatives might take a swipe at your laptop...), better battery life (0.125W or thereabouts vs ~1.5 - 3W for spinning platters), longer lifetime, faster, lighter... (no heavy magnets, motors)

[Husar]

I don't get why games would download faster onto an SSD? I have a 50MBit connection and it's nowhere near fast enough to keep my HDD busy.

The folder linking and stuff is interesting but two things:

1. it sounds like an SSD is a lot more maintenance intensive and requires loads of planning

2. if you outsource too many files, there's no point in having an SSD, right? For example the page file would greatly benefit from being on the SSD I guess, since it's closer to the speed of actual RAM, yet it would reduce the lifetime a lot, kinda hard to decide there.

[Tellos Athenaios]

I don't get why games would download faster onto an SSD? I have a 50MBit connection and it's nowhere near fast enough to keep my HDD busy.

They would not download faster. Your OS would boot faster, your programs and files would load faster, though. So once that download had completed your game might well run faster.

2. if you outsource too many files, there's no point in having an SSD, right? For example the page file would greatly benefit from being on the SSD I guess, since it's closer to the speed of actual RAM, yet it would reduce the lifetime a lot, kinda hard to decide there.

SSD's are not as fast as RAM, not by orders of magnitude ... They do not have that kind of bandwith, or latency; so you will notice swapping as being rather slow whether or not the swapping occurs to the SSD or not.

[Furunculus]

Personally I have Steam on the SSDs and use "mklink /J" to link the actual folders to my main hard drive. I like this set up because Steam is notorious for not liking being installed on any volume other than the "C:" volume.

I have always had Steam installed on dedicated "Games" partition............