Good SSD for Boot Drive and game storage?

JobsforFun

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Jul 27, 2015
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I was planning on buying an SSD to use as my boot drive and storage for steam games like Fallout4, and CSGO for example. Although I have never been in the market for a SSD I wanted to know what are some good SSDs for what I want to use them for. And also I am currently using Windows 8 do I need to install a fresh copy of windows onto the blank SSD I am planning on upgrading to Windows 10 so would that upgrade also work for it as well?
 

JobsforFun

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I'm not exactly sure how much space i'd need. From you comment a minimum of 500GB is a good amount for it to be a boot drive and to be used for game storage?
 

USAFRet

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Is this to be the only drive in the system? If so, 500GB or more.
If you have others, a 250 or 500GB will work no problem.

You just have to balance what storage space you need.
 

JobsforFun

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Well currently I have a 1TB hard drive that I use for everything since it is the only storage I have currently
 

Kryptkeeper

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Depends how many games you want on your ssd. I use an 850 evo 250gb. I have WoW, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Hearthstone and League of Legends installed on my ssd along with a few other programs (ms office, geforce experience etc) and i have 30gb free. All my other games Installed on HDD. Ive switched wow to hdd before and couldnt tell the difference. the only noticeable differences are reaching 100% faster when entering a game of LoL (but then you're still waiting for everyone else running off hdd) and in starcraft 2 where the really long load screens are still long but not so long.
 

JobsforFun

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I'll most likely get a SSD that has about 400-500GB of storage, any recommendations?
 

Kryptkeeper

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I'm not too savvy with transfering stuff to new drives when an os is involved. I would install win to the ssd. copy whatever i needed to save from the hdd to the ssd (images, videos, music, documents). wipe the hdd and reinstall all my software changing the destination to the hdd. then transfer files back from ssd to hdd.

Tips as a newbie to ssd. 1) NEVER full format the ssd, if you need to wipe it for whatever reason choose "quick format".
2) Learn how to create junctions, some programs especially web browsers will tend to set their temp folder location to that of the os even if you install them to the hdd and they don't let you change it. Putting in a junction to connect the folder to the hdd will save you alot of unneeded writes to your ssd and increase its life expectancy.
 

Kryptkeeper

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Samsung have pretty much the best overall performance, 850 evo are pretty sweet. Have a shop around, black friday and cyber monday are upon us and there's been some good deals on a few ssds out there.
 

USAFRet

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#2 - that junction crap is COMPLETELY not necessary.
Firstly, the concept of too many writes killing the SSD lifespan is long outdated.
Current SSD's are warranted to last to 75 or 150TBW (or more in some cases).

Actual endurance testing of current consumer grade SSD's has shown them to last beyond 600TB, in some cases beyond 1PB.

My personal use? 3+ years, running 24/7 as the boot drive. Reasonably heavy use as a normal kind of person.
120GB Kingston - in 3+ years, ~12TBW.
I'll leave it to you to extrapolate that out.

The only adjustments made were turning off hibernation, reducing the pagefile to 1GB min/max, and redirecting Downloads, Docs, Music, etc to other drives, via the built in functionality.

There is zero need to force, via junction points, everything to be elsewhere.
Outdated concept for an outdated problem.
 

Kryptkeeper

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I dont know if it the folders are recognised differently, the standard "music" "video" "documents" files gave me the option to change the folder location on the "location" tab. Most other folders dont give the "location" tab unless you can enable it somehow that I don't know about.

Before I changed the location of my firefox files using a junction, over the course of a month id had 1.2TB of writes to the ssd. im now into the 8th month after adding the junction and it's only added an additional 1.6TB of writes.
 

USAFRet

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Libraries folders - Changing location of Doc/Music/Video...that functionality is built into the OS.
Browser download location? Built into the various browsers.
Everything else? It does not matter.

Does the 'junction point' thing work? Yes.
Is it needed? Not IMHO.
Is it hazardous? Possibly.
 

Kryptkeeper

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browser download location yes. i mean the temp files where everything you view on the browser is temporarily stored until you close the browser, text, images, browser history, anytime you type something new into the search bar, its all constantly updating temp files.
 

USAFRet

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OK, yes. And to what purpose would you force redirection of this?
An effort to avoiding the mythical concept of too many writes to an SSD will kill it?

The vast majority of people who have an SSD as their boot drive have not done this.
The vast majority of people who have an SSD as their boot drive have not had it die from too many writes.

Can you show an SSD, in normal use, that has approached 75+ TBW in a multi-year usage?

Now...if you are using the drive for some special purpose...a database with thousands of hits per day...or a render farm, moving dozens of GB back and forth every day....that's different.
IE, Chrome, or FF usage? Not even a bit of consideration.
 

Kryptkeeper

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Well for a start it could mean not hitting your warranty write limit before the time warranty of 3-5yrs (which ever it happens to be) runs out incase your ssd fails and you need to use your warranty.
 

USAFRet

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75TBW, 150TBW....typical warranty levels.
Current consumer grade SSD's have been shown to last beyond 600TBW.
http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-data-retention-after-600tb

This would be writing hundreds of GB every day, for years.

But whatever. I still maintain that the junction point thing in an effort to minimize writing to the SSD is completely not needed.
YMMV.