Ssd vs hdd for new gaming pc

[mrbowler]

Hi everyone. I am building a new gaming pc, and have been debating what hard drive storage to get. I was going to go with a 256gb SSD (for the OS and games), and an HDD (for other storage). However, I keep reading articles that say the SSDs will fail faster, so I became worried about getting a SSD. At the same time, it seems that loading programs and booting up the computer would be much faster with the SSD, but if there are games that constantly write to the SSD then it will damage the drive.

All that being said it seems like I have three options:
1) 10000rpm HD for everything
2) smaller SSD (120gb) for only the OS and Office, but no games which will be on a HDD
3) bigger SSD (256gb) for OS/Office/Games, and and HDD for other stuff

What should I do?

 

[jay2tall]

SSD's have come a long way in the recent years. The new models hold up really well and while the NAND chips do have a life span of how many times you can write to them, this is evenly distributed throughout the drive. It is very unlikely as a consumer you will use the drive long enough to exhaust the write endurance of the drive. When you get into enterprise systems you have to look at this more carefully, and when you use an SSD as a drive cache, it will experience more writes. For these scenarios they usually use more expensive SLC drives. Your typical consumer drive is MLC as it is cheaper. I've also seen some long term studies on HDD and also SSD's, though they were with older SSD's, and the studies were actually very interesting. Even though an SSD has no moving parts their failure rate and failure trend was very similar to that of an HDD. Here is a good read for you. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html

I would go with option 3. I finally caves several months ago and went this route. I have a 240GB for OS/Apps/games, and a 1TB for DATA. The difference when using an SSD is night and day and completely worth it. While it adds no performance in game, it makes using your PC more enjoyable. For example if there is a Windows update, I never put it off. I just let it reboot and in 20 seconds it back to my desktop. I went with an Intel SSD as they have good performance, but their return rates are lowest amount SSD's. I have a Samsung F3 1TB drive and the same is true for that drive.

 

[mrbowler]

Best answer selected by mrbowler.

 

[mrbowler]

SSD's have come a long way in the recent years. The new models hold up really well and while the NAND chips do have a life span of how many times you can write to them, this is evenly distributed throughout the drive. It is very unlikely as a consumer you will use the drive long enough to exhaust the write endurance of the drive. When you get into enterprise systems you have to look at this more carefully, and when you use an SSD as a drive cache, it will experience more writes. For these scenarios they usually use more expensive SLC drives. Your typical consumer drive is MLC as it is cheaper. I've also seen some long term studies on HDD and also SSD's, though they were with older SSD's, and the studies were actually very interesting. Even though an SSD has no moving parts their failure rate and failure trend was very similar to that of an HDD. Here is a good read for you. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html

I would go with option 3. I finally caves several months ago and went this route. I have a 240GB for OS/Apps/games, and a 1TB for DATA. The difference when using an SSD is night and day and completely worth it. While it adds no performance in game, it makes using your PC more enjoyable. For example if there is a Windows update, I never put it off. I just let it reboot and in 20 seconds it back to my desktop. I went with an Intel SSD as they have good performance, but their return rates are lowest amount SSD's. I have a Samsung F3 1TB drive and the same is true for that drive.

Thank you so much for the reply and the article link! I was starting to go crazy reading lots of other confusing articles and forum posts (unfortunately not forums at tomshardware, so they never stayed on track). It sounds like even games that write to the hard drive do not do so enough to cause major problems for the drive. Also, thank you for the testimonial! I will definitely go with option 3 now.

 

[jay2tall]

I have a buddy who has a bad taste in his mouth from SSD's. He had an old Corsair and one of the first Intels and both failed on him. One Intel was a firmware issue and the other, who knows. Most companies have really come a long way and even started going down the path of making their own controllers for on the SSD to make them better. I'd be pretty confident in them now. Gaming really doesn't write much to the SSD. Cache drives do because they are constantly being written to. Also in enterprise, data base and log drives get hit really hard which is why they would eat up an MLC drive pretty quickly.

There are a lot of articles on best practices in windows for SSD's. Mostly for performance and saving disk space. Just do a search. Here are two articles to get you started that I just found.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/windows-7-and-ssds-cutting-your-system-drive-down-to-size/2941
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/3116/tweaktown_s_solid_state_drive_optimization_guide

 

[mrbowler]

I have a buddy who has a bad taste in his mouth from SSD's. He had an old Corsair and one of the first Intels and both failed on him. One Intel was a firmware issue and the other, who knows. Most companies have really come a long way and even started going down the path of making their own controllers for on the SSD to make them better. I'd be pretty confident in them now. Gaming really doesn't write much to the SSD. Cache drives do because they are constantly being written to. Also in enterprise, data base and log drives get hit really hard which is why they would eat up an MLC drive pretty quickly.

There are a lot of articles on best practices in windows for SSD's. Mostly for performance and saving disk space. Just do a search. Here are two articles to get you started that I just found.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/windows-7-and-ssds-cutting-your-system-drive-down-to-size/2941
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/3116/tweaktown_s_solid_state_drive_optimization_guide

Thanks again for the info! These are great articles too. I have no idea how I read so many articles and didn't come across these.