budget laptop gaming... hard or SSD drive question

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EricFX1984

[H]ard|Gawd
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May 21, 2010
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I have an Asus X54c-BBK3 laptop, that was recently dropped (the joys of having kids) and the hard drive is now dead... I have been debating on weather I would get a 64GB SSD, OR another 320GB old school hard drive. The price is the same no matter what I get ($55)

The only game I plan to play on the laptop is Star Trek Online, and maybe WoW

Intel Pentium B960 (2.2GHz dual core (one step below the i3)
4GB ram (soon to be 8GB)
intel onboard POS graphics
15.4" screen
 
Get the 320GB. I only have Windows 7 installed with WoW and I am using 55GB of disk space. Not much room for the next expansion if you go with 64GB becuase its not going to be 64GB on the dot.

Plus, the SSD will benefit WoW for its loading times, but that's really it.
 
I would go SSD, I have a b960 laptop as well and I threw in a 64gb ssd and it improved the system greatly. Boots into win 7 in 28 seconds. You can also turn off system restore and do some housekeeping and keep windows in the 20 some gb range. My win 7 desktop that has a ton of software installed on it is only using 27.5gb off my 64gb M4 ssd.
 
You need 128gb to function normally, my applications barely fit in 64gb, no way I can fit my data files in that too.

Put it this way, I have a 128GB SSD right now on my desktop, and I have about 40 gigs left. My documents, ebooks, references, and code archives are on a separate harddrive taking up another 35 gigs. If I had to, I can squeeze into the 128 SSD if I discarded all my non work related files (music, movies and games).

It would depend with how much space your applications are currently using and how much space you're willing to sacrifice. But there's no way I can work with 64. As crazycd1 said, you'll need to do quite a bit of system maintenance to work with 64gb. If you don't want to bother with that, go for the mechanical drive.
 
Good point Sly, I have NO data on my PC's forgot to mention that I have a home server that holds everything and an external drive if I want to take all mu music or data on the road. So if you want to store all that on the SSD as well then 128 is min I would go with.
 
Yeah, an NAS changes things. If you're always within wifi range of your home, you can basically just turn that into a network drive and assign "\\homenas\disk1_pt1\filesformylaptop" into drive "Z:\" or something and put all the non-essentials there.
 
well I NORMALLY an within range of wireless G. But it seems like installing programs and such over the network would defeat the purpose.

Star Trek Online is only about 6GB installed... so that would be no problem... HOWEVER WoW is 23GB

at one point in time, on my main computer, I had WoW and Win7 installed on a 64GB drive. It worked great, BUT there was not a whole lot of room to play with. I eventually moved WoW to to my storage drive (as I played it a lot less) which freed up a lot of SSD space.

One thing that makes the SSD tempted in a laptop is that if, or rather WHEN the toddler knocks the laptop over again, it is survive the fall.
 
64gb is a bit cramped, even for just a few MMOs in my opinion. Have you considered buying one of the HDDs that are designed to better resist shocks, or one of those "hybrid" drives like the Seagate XTs that have speed advantages over HDDs because of a small built-in SSD seamlessly cacheing important stuff? Not sure if any of them are out of your budget or not, but the're worth a look.
 
I will always trade speed for capacity 750gb-1tb drives can be had for much less than a great 128gb ssd
 
Don't even consider an HDD for boot. Ever.

HDD's for boot are dead. They must rest in peace.

If you must maybe try one of those hybrid drives.
 
You could get a 60gb SSD for OS and what not, and a DVD to HDD caddy and put a 'storage' drive in that. I don't really use my DVD drive in my laptop...so I simply got one - haven't been happier. Then I modded the back plate to accommodate another hard drive so my laptop is more of a desktop now rofl.

This is what I'm talking about: http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAP...l7Te9qRyrYFMJJAgf10G4%3D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc
 
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I would agree with most of what's said above, and repeat that 64 gb is pretty small for most purposes.

I would maybe get a 90gb, they can be found for not much more then the 64gb, but give you enough space to breath with.
 
Xaeos said:
64gb is a bit cramped, even for just a few MMOs in my opinion. Have you considered buying one of the HDDs that are designed to better resist shocks, or one of those "hybrid" drives like the Seagate XTs that have speed advantages over HDDs because of a small built-in SSD seamlessly cacheing important stuff? Not sure if any of them are out of your budget or not, but the're worth a look.
Click to expand...

I also have a Seagate Momentus XT on my netbook. The speed difference from the original 5,000rpm drive is very noticeable, but i'm not sure if it's because of the 4Gig SSD or just the fact that it's a high density platter running at 7,000rpm. I cycle through a lot of programs so i'm not sure if that 4Gig actually helps, but then again, i do use the same OS and basic tools so it could. Wish there was a way to check its actual performance,

PS: It uses considerably more power than the stock harddrive. It added a few watts to my watt meter.
 
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