Building a new rig - SSD & HDD?

[eskEMO_iwL]

Hi guys,

I'm looking at investing about a grand into a new tower in the next few weeks (Yay for Black November on Newegg!) and I'm running into some confusion for the storage part.

I'd like to get Win 7 Professional (I've only heard bad things about Win 8 for gaming and general use; is that wrong?) for the setup. I've got about 300~ Steam games (and I do like to keep them installed if possible, so I don't have to wait for installs if I feel the urge to randomly pick one up and play) and I dabble into a few MMO's.

Now, the question is...should I get a small SSD for my OS and then a 2 TB HDD for the rest? Would that make a noticeable difference? Or should I pile it all onto a single HDD and call it good. Would having the games on a secondary drive slow them down or cause performance issues between the OS and the game?

Any insight and even recommendations for solid, long-lasting drives would be awesome.
Thanks.

 

[USAFRet]

a small SSD for my OS and then a 2 TB HDD

That is a very typical setup. No smaller than a 128GB SSD, though.

Would having the games on a secondary drive slow them down or cause performance issues between the OS and the game?

No.

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hello,
I would go with an SSD but 256 GB drive. That gives you plenty of room for your OS, and programs. It is more the sweet spot for SSD's at present. My favorite is the Samsung 840 evo or pro. ~ $175-225.

For simplicity, just as you mentioned, a 2 TB HDD for lesser used apps or data. Again my favorite is the high performance WD caviar black 6Gb/s 64MB cache drive. ~ $115

Using a SSD for your OS will make a big difference is overall bootup and performance speed of your new rig. It's the only way to go!