Would an SSD be good for a more casual pc gamer?

[WhiteSnake91]

To summarize the situation, my little brother has an A10 5800K he upgraded with a GTX 660 ti 2gb Superclocked EVGA gpu, he has 8gb ram 2133mhz G.Skill Sniper, and a 1tb 7200rpm WD Black Drive which is slowly dying, HDD Sentinel claims it's at 15% health remaining, and it takes FOREVER for his pc to boot up, everything still works, but it's slow to load and can lag at times.


I thought of getting him a Crucial m500 120gb SSD plus a WD Blue 1tb HDD, because those two would roughly cost $120, which is what 240-250gb SSD's are going for on sale now days.

Apparently he's quite happy with the performance of the cpu, in comparison it would be equal to an Athlon x4 750k which Tom's recommends for budget 1080p gaming, except his A10 5800K turbo boosts to 4.2ghz.

I'm just not sure if a 250gb SSD, or a 120gb OS SSD plus 1tb regular HDD would be better. I'm thinking 120gb SSD+1tb because I imagine the 250gb SSD would fill up quick. An alternative is just a 2tb 7200rpm hdd for around ~$100

he doesn't play really demanding stuff like BF4 online. Mostly console ports with an Xbox 360 controller on 1080p ultra settings-which play very well contrary to all the anti-AMD bias online, or TF2.

On a side note, I thought it was quite ironic that the WD Black drive he has is dying, I've never had a HDD fail on me, from Seagate, to sucky slow Samsung one in my old 2009 laptop, Hitatchi, or Toshiba...But yet this WD Black which is touted as the best HDD is dying, like, wtf. I'm just going to throw it away, WD is just going to send a refurbed drive anyway, and we all know how BAD those are reviewed.

 

[Deleted member 1300495]

I would get the 120 ssd with the 1tb hdd. The SSD would be mainly for games and the OS. The HDD would be for everything else

 

[Danbuscus25]

if he is happy with that A-10 then that is great 😀 and it depends on how much you value very fast boot times and load your games fast. if it is important to your brother, and you can afford a ssd and a new hdd, then go for it 😀

 

[JohnnyLucky]

In a typical scenario a casual gamer or a typical home office user has one 120GB solid state drive and one hard disk drive. The operating system, software applications, utilities, and a few favorite games can be stored on the ssd. Additional games and data files are stored on the hard disk drive. The games can be swapped out between the ssd and hard drive as needed. It is easy to do. The 120GB ssd's used to be considered the "sweet spot" in terms of value for the dollar spent. However, with the reduction in prices and increased performance there has been a shift toward 256GB ssd's.

I maintain the ssd database listed in a sticky at the very top of this forum section. Here is a link:

http://www.johnnylucky.org/data-storage/ssd-database.html

Scroll down to the Crucial section or any other brand you might be interested in and follow the links to the technical reviews listed for each model.