High Capacity SSD as primary drive

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g00z13

Weaksauce
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Sep 15, 2018
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OK, so building my first PC with an SSD/HDD combo. The SSD will house the OS while the HDD will have games, movies, music etc. Question is why buy something bigger than say a 250gb SSD for the OS? Isn't everything else supposed to go to the HDD? I feel like i'm missing something.

Thanks
 
Folks do that cuz they cant afford a huge SSD.

I advise you of course install the OS to the SSD but also your favorite games and apps you use frequently and less used stuff on the HDD.

Or man up and go all SSD and frame the HDD and hang on wall as a tribute to days gone by.
 
Ha ha ha, I see. So basically just use the SSD's and forget HDDs like a bad ex girlfriend. Gotcha, so it's basically just a money saving situation. Will the SSD be affected if it's just for media, as in constant reading of the drive like music? Premature wear out? Or will it probably outlive me
 
Well, with a proper backup method it doesn't matter really.

SSD tech is still fairly new and constantly improving and some things we just don't know yet about longevity.

I still have 2 older models in use that I've had for 3 and 5 years respectively.
 
I've run 256GB SSD + 1TB SSD for what 3 years now? Previously ran the 256GB + 2.5 1tb platter. No real issues, everything is fast/copies quick etc. Have a NAS with my other media saved on it. With SSD prices the way they are now, if you have the spare cash, it's worth it IMO. My next plan is 2 m.2 ssds only, so no cables in my build at all (ITX) for sata power/data. The dreammm.
 
HDD for storage of big stuff. It mainly depends on money you can afford to throw on SSDs.
SSDs other "flaw" is their limited TBW (terabytes written), and not how much data they read throughout their life.
For good brands this TBW is an order of magnitude higher than the official warranty values. Samsung 850 EVO 250GB has 75TBW but there are tests it can sustain 2+PB writes :) .
Larger drives have higher TBW so if you use yours very aggressively, even for small data, a larger drive would be better suited.
For moderate everyday use I think you shouldn't have to worry for 5-8 years :) .
I wouldn't swap my 3-4+ TB HDDs for ssds yet where rarely accessed data is stored, backups, movies, series, software installations (installers, not where the software is installed - the main SSD with the OS).
Games are another story but again, a SSD here would just accelerate level loading and not framerate or anything.
 
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Lots of great information here. Damnit, just canceled my 250gb ssd order for a 1tb one haha. Well, I knew i was going to spend more money with a PC (steam sales) but damn. haha
 
ReaperX22 said:
I've run 256GB SSD + 1TB SSD for what 3 years now? Previously ran the 256GB + 2.5 1tb platter. No real issues, everything is fast/copies quick etc. Have a NAS with my other media saved on it. With SSD prices the way they are now, if you have the spare cash, it's worth it IMO. My next plan is 2 m.2 ssds only, so no cables in my build at all (ITX) for sata power/data. The dreammm.
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Is the M2, way faster than an SSD?, seeing some youtube videos i thought it was only a seconds shaved off. Or are you going for the cosmetic aspect of the m2.
 
M.2 is just the form factor and physica interface. It brings with it a new additional protocol (NVME) allowing up to 32Gbps for SSD modules that support it. There are M.2 SSDs that only support SATA logical interface, and they are limited by the same ~560MB/s as their SATA 2.5" cousins.
So M.2 slot supports the old SATA standard and SSDs and the new NVMEs with up to ~3600MB/s speeds. Well, some motherboards may not support one or the other for some of their M.2 slots and that's up to the manufacturer.
I still prefer 2.5" SATA SSDs over NVME as there is no real world benefit to NVME M.2 for everyday use and I can use a 2.5" SATA device on another older computer if I decide so at some time.
One wire or two is not a factor for me, SATA cables are thin enough :) .

And... I don't see often mentioned another flaw of ssds - their limited retention periods of user data.
If a drive is close to the 'end' of its TBW, cells get enough worn out that the drive, when not powered, would retain data for several months or sometimes weeks. So not appropriate for storage in the locker.
Pro series or server series are much worse in this respect.
 
Gotcha, it's like learning a new language for me. My last PC was back in 2005. Well, for now i'll stick with the SSD for the price/gb. I did try to future proof my build as best as i could. the motherboard is the gigabyte x470 aorus ultra gaming.
 
So I run 500gb on an NVM-Express drive and 1TB on a SATA SSD RAID, all my spinning storage is on my home server. I think SSD prices are low enough that a 500gb drive is reasonable for a primary, and for some, ONLY drive.
 
It really depends on how much space you use. I think if you can fit everything on a 1TB SSD and have enough free space it is worth it. If you have to get 2TB then the price is a little high and depends on your budget. If you need more than 2TB it is very expensive.
 
If you can afford a massive SSD for primary - go for it. Overall you'll be better off.

However, lots of stuff really doesn't need SSD speeds, like listening to ripped music, or watching ripped movies, or viewing stored pictures/documents/etc. A spinner HD will work just fine for most of your stored files - and will save you some money if you only use a smaller SSD for OS and high demand programs/games.
 
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1TB WD are under $150. I have 2 of them. 1 for OS/Apps, 2nd for Games. Even if you do 1, you can fit plenty of games on it with your OS.
 
I like to put my Office and Creative Apps and certain games on my SSD.
I have a 512GB SSD and GTA5 and my Battlefield games nearly filled it up.
I use a couple of 4TB Blacks and an 8TB Red for my other games, project backups, pron and whatnot, lol
 
I'll drop my hat in here and say a big primary drive SSD is the way to go. I've got 2TB (2x 1TB in RAID0) for my boot drive, and it's *lovely*.

It's not that all the games or apps I use necessarily need the speed; many of them don't. It's the sheer freedom from having to think about it.

Prior to my current arrangement, I had a 250GB SSD and a 4TB HDD for storage. I was constantly installing a game to the SSD, playing through, then deciding to play a new game and first having to move the first one over to the HDD to clear up space. Then maybe later, my squad moves back over to the original game (oh WoW, why can't my friends give you up) and I'd want to move it back, so there would be another round of shuffling.

Fast forward to 2TB of SSD; installing a game? Fuck it, put it on the SSD. Apps? SSD. More games? SSD. Still got ~700 GB free, and I could *easily* clear up a bunch of space by deleting stuff I have zero chance of ever coming back to play.

The *only* thing I directly send to the still-installed 4TB HDD is ShadowPlay recordings. One day I accidentally left the 4K 80 Mbps ShadowPlay capture running long (24h+) after the game was over. By the time I noticed, the capture was ~800 GB in size. Oops. Mechanical drives are good for that.
 
Here's my setup:

Samsung 960 Evo 500 GB- OS, scratch etc
Adata SU800 500 GB- Steam games
Seagate Barracuda 4TB HDD- Plex movie storage, photos, music etc.

If I had to do it over, I'd choose a larger secondary SSD for more video game storage.
 
If you want an extra bang for the buck SSD: here is a 1TB for $150

(Good for games and what not)

Its not as fast say a good Samsung Sata 3 SSD, but its a huge step up from a HDD.
 
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Neapolitan6th said:
If you want an extra bang for the buck SSD: here is a 1TB for $150

(Good for games and what not)

Its not as fast say a good Samsung Sata 3 SSD, but its a huge step up from a HDD.
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Probably better to stick to something slightly more name-brand- here is a Sandisk one for the same $150. Or spend the extra $17 and go for the real deal. That last one was only $158 a few days ago, but that sale is over.
 
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I like a small (250G, max 500G) SSD dedicated to OS and programs. Having a dedicated drive reserves all its bandwidth to OS and programs and not interfering with tons of other data and storage that spans further up to 1 or 2TB on the SAME drive.
Well, if installing the games on a SSD, then it may 'grow' to whatever maximum gigabytes games would take.
My kind of work doesn't require a SSD for work drive but the prices today plummeted significantly (MX500s and 860 EVOs) and I got one for my documents, work files and programming projects. Also having a gigabit internet connection was a small deciding factor :) - HDD could keep up to 100MB/s but sometimes torrents couldn't fully develop their speeds.
 
Benjamin Guzman said:
Ha ha ha, I see. So basically just use the SSD's and forget HDDs like a bad ex girlfriend. Gotcha, so it's basically just a money saving situation. Will the SSD be affected if it's just for media, as in constant reading of the drive like music? Premature wear out? Or will it probably outlive me
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Under normal desktop usage, you will probably never hit that point. Yes, SSDs have a limited write amount, but to give an example, I have a cheap SanDisk 250GB SSD as the cache drive for my media server thats 32TB in size, ALL data gets written to the SSD before being moved to the normal HDDs, that is A LOT of data to be written to that little SSD, and it's still going strong years later.
 
Brahmzy said:
Um, no, it’s not. Was running RAID 0 SSDs in 2006.
There is nothing new about them. Proven platform.
Has nothing to do with the need for backups. ALWAYS have backups.
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This, I have several SSDs getting up on the years now.

Funny thing is, in datacenters and according to manufacturer return stats, they are proving to be more reliable than hard drives by a significant degree during their useful life. (YMMV if you bought trash during the gutter era, OCZ etc)
Datacenters are used to having regular shipments of replacement rust and having a decent spare count on hand, the ones I deal with aren't seeing a need to do this on the same scale with flash arrays.

No moving parts is the simplest win most likely, but I think different players could be a part of it too.
 
SSDs stagger for a year or so, but lately they have been dropping off a lot, and probably will drop even more before years end, samsung is suppose to have increase their capacity, probably other manufacturers have also. Atm for me 1tb is where is at, but games starting to get a lot bigger, so soon 2tb is what i would build with, that said really depends on the budget, mechanical drives are still ideal price wise for storage like videos, music, images, etc.
 
My standard for desktop setups for the last 5 or so years has been a 120-256gb ssd for OS (256gb+ is best these days), a 500gb or 1tb ssd for games that might need fast loading times (mmo's, open world games) or get played a lot. Everything else is put on HDD of varying sizes. It has been incredibly handy having 1-2 HDDs in a gaming system to have immediate easy access images of my OS/games ssd. A benefit of having a smaller OS drive is quick backups that take less than 30minutes.
 
4330thgink said:
If you can afford a massive SSD for primary - go for it. Overall you'll be better off.

However, lots of stuff really doesn't need SSD speeds, like listening to ripped music, or watching ripped movies, or viewing stored pictures/documents/etc. A spinner HD will work just fine for most of your stored files - and will save you some money if you only use a smaller SSD for OS and high demand programs/games.
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Actually this is my scenario, I like to have my own music and not stream so the majority of my space will be allocated for music files. Dont see much of a benefit to SSD with that. I'll keep the main 500gb SSD for games and programs.
 
BoiseTech said:
1TB WD are under $150. I have 2 of them. 1 for OS/Apps, 2nd for Games. Even if you do 1, you can fit plenty of games on it with your OS.
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For games i think i'll end up getting this 1TB. Shouldn't be much speed different between a samsung and WD right? At least not noticeable difference.
 
Neapolitan6th said:
If you want an extra bang for the buck SSD: here is a 1TB for $150

(Good for games and what not)

Its not as fast say a good Samsung Sata 3 SSD, but its a huge step up from a HDD.
Click to expand...


Is the speed that much faster with a Samsung? For instance a HDD will take 30sec to boot up, while an SSD might take 15. Huge difference. Is it the same with different SSD's or is it negligible?
 
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tedych said:
I like a small (250G, max 500G) SSD dedicated to OS and programs. Having a dedicated drive reserves all its bandwidth to OS and programs and not interfering with tons of other data and storage that spans further up to 1 or 2TB on the SAME drive.
Well, if installing the games on a SSD, then it may 'grow' to whatever maximum gigabytes games would take.
My kind of work doesn't require a SSD for work drive but the prices today plummeted significantly (MX500s and 860 EVOs) and I got one for my documents, work files and programming projects. Also having a gigabit internet connection was a small deciding factor :) - HDD could keep up to 100MB/s but sometimes torrents couldn't fully develop their speeds.
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you torrent from home? isnt that risky?
 
g00z13 said:
you torrent from home? isnt that risky?
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No, I torrent rarely, things that are not "dangerous", series I cannot watch on local televisions or old national movies not broadcasted anymore, or trial versions of software etc. I'm not from US or Canada.
Actually the difference between downloading on HDD or SSD is not big, but it becomes when the number of connected seeders increase and it's understandable. I don't like RAIDs, too many points of possible failure, I like SSDs much more as an "alternative".
 
g00z13 said:
Is the speed that much faster with a Samsung? For instance a HDD will take 30sec to boot up, while an SSD might take 15. Huge difference. Is it the same with different SSD's or is it negligible?
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Its more negligible for normal use. Something I cannot quantify is reliability of name brand vs off brand models.

Some people may need faster drives for productivity reasons such as video editing scratch drives and what not.

For everyday performance, even the highest end drives aren't going to make you boot up instantaneously. It'll be a bit before we see that. So I'd say you're good so you can rest easy (y)
 
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Something I cannot quantify is reliability of name brand vs off brand models.
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This is one reason I would say just go with the Samsung drive. With that said I when I did not take this advice when I purchased a 512GB WDC black G1 NVMe drive for my Ryzen X470 system which ended up having a compatibility problem (random disappearance from the system). Replacing it with a 1TB Samsung 960 fixed the problem.
 
In some circumstances the difference in boot times is drastic. In my case I installed Server 2016 on a HDD (1TB WD Black). Then I transferred the installation to a SSD. I have Win10 as well, on a HDD (for games).
The Server 2016 boots an order of magnitude faster on the SSD (7-8 sec vs. a minute or more, with everything installed). WIndows 10 boots very fast on the HDD, way faster than 2016 when it was on a HDD and a little slower than 2016 on the SSD.
Cheap SSDs have lower IOPS which may impact considerably boot (and other) times. Samsung SATA SSDs have about 90k/80k IOPS while some cheap brands have 30-40k.
 
g00z13 said:
For games i think i'll end up getting this 1TB. Shouldn't be much speed different between a samsung and WD right? At least not noticeable difference.
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Not at all. I have no issues with my WD ssd's. For the price, you can't beat them.
 
g00z13 said:
For games i think i'll end up getting this 1TB. Shouldn't be much speed different between a samsung and WD right? At least not noticeable difference.
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Nope. And Sandisk is owned by WD as well, and the WD Blue 3D drives and the Sandisk 3D drive I listed are relabels of the exact same product.

g00z13 said:
Is the speed that much faster with a Samsung? For instance a HDD will take 30sec to boot up, while an SSD might take 15. Huge difference. Is it the same with different SSD's or is it negligible?
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It's not much about speed; lots of SATA-based SSDs run up against the limits of what SATA can offer, which is why they all top out at ~500 MB/s. The Samsungs are good performers, but in general any circa-2017 SSD should be fine.

However, the Samsung *does* come with a 5 year warranty and they are a company that is 100% not going to go out of business within that 5 year period. The warranty procedures are well known and easy to follow.

WD/Sandisk is 3 years and falls into that category as well.

The first SSD linked was the Inland Professional 1TB unit for $150, and I have a challenge for you: find the Inland Professional website and tech support phone number.
 
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