question for user with big SSDs

C

Cbshahji

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 3, 2010
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I was wondering about users having big SSD like 100GB and up, do you guys install your games on SSD or on regular HD and installing game is good for SSD since once most of us finish the game we uninstall it to play new games? will this decrease the SSD lifespan significantly? i know few user do have big SSD on laptop does it provide enough space compare to 250GB and up regular HD come in laptop.

Thanks
CB
 
It isn't really that big of an issue. When you install applications it isn't like constant writing over the life of the application. Game data (I would imagine) is more like a write 20GB once then there are some saves and stuff (a few MB's each time). Not like you are re-writing 20GB each program launch. I could be wrong.
 
will this decrease the SSD lifespan significantly?
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No.

Install any application you want fast on the SSD. Do not worry much about the lifespan. Remember Intel Specifies that you can write 20GB of data every single day for 5 consecutive years on their current SSDs. Next years G3 models will greatly increase this. I expect 20 year lifetimes or about 4 times a normal hard drive.
 
Firstly, a couple things: as per sig, I've got 2 64GB drives, ones dead right now so I'm back on just the sole drive. Second: Steam only lets you install to one drive, so once steams installed on a drive, thats it, you may not move the games without re-installing steam and then re-installing from backups. Lastly, "Ware-Leveling" in conjunction with the durability of modern flash means that you can hit a drive with as many writes as a data basing OS's swap file can manage (read: alot), and have absolutely no life-time degradation from it. In the consumer space, modern SSD's are projected to last decades.

So I bought my first 64GB SSD thinking fondly of my first real gaming rig, which had an 80GB drive, and remembering how I never really ran into storage troubles. Times have changed; WoW is no longer considered huge.
timeshavechangedbigfiles.jpg

In this screenshot, the games under "favorites" are all the games I have installed

This is my problem now, and it was my problem then too: 64GB simply isn't large enough to install the majority of games on. I still regularly play Team Fortress 2 and it has been a real inconvenience not having space for it.

That said, these problems are alleviated in almost their entirety when you move to 128GB. All my favorite stand-by games can be installed in conjunction with all the games that I'm currently playing with a dozen or two spare gigs of space. Moving forward, this might become a problem, but with the backup facilities steam provides swapping games that get played infrequently isn't much of a problem: backing up and restoring a game from a steam backup takes on the order of 5 to 10 minutes (on either an SSD or HDD I might add).

The main purpose of an SSD is to install you're every-day applications to it: The OS (specifically the swap file), the Browser, the Word editor, and any applications you need in your industry that you use everyday (in my case, a couple IDE's and a few Linux builds). Getting all that stuff to launch instantaneously can make the overall experience much better, even if the data these applications use is being pulled from an old-style spinning media.

As SSD's are now, I'm a huge fan of running a 32GB SSD as your OS/application drive. Should games be considered part of those applications? The benefit is there, but thats definitely an expensive proposition because, as I said, you're going to want 128GB minimum. If I were building a gaming setup, the threshold would probably when you've already included a core i7 CPU, and HD 6900 series card: once your into those kinds of dollars its a good idea to start looking at trying to get every game you own on your SSD setup.

Now, If you're considering an SSD setup there's a few things you should do:
1) ensure your SSD controller is in AHCI or RAID mode.
2) be aware that you need TRIM to keep your PC write speeds up, and as of 11/12/2010, TRIM is not supported through a RAID (although Intel will be patching that into Rapid Storage Manager very soon, and I'd imagine AMD will be doing the same if not for SB850 (ie this generation chipset), then probably for the next)
3) implementing this registry change is an absolute must:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/87555-user-profile-change-default-location.html
(Warning: this will blow up AD networks. If you don't know what AD is your fine), as it will natively move all your data onto another drive, as in the screen shot above, my "Main Drive ( D: )"
 
after installing all the necessary application and windows 7 i've about 20GB left which isn't enough but i can install most of the modern game (excluding wow which i've stop playing but might get back on next month as i'll be doing nothing but vacationing) i did install few games and played them and uninstalled them not sure if it'll be enough after a month or so with new games. i did get the SSD without knowing the tweaks i've to made and now that i've done it i do see little imporvement but still i've long to go to get it fully working. i did see launching time in some game cut down from 10-20 sec to 3-5 second including loading at next level.
 
with a 128 GB ssd you have plenty of room to install 8+ games. realistically you are not likely to be playing that many games at once. so I have steam on my hard drive (active on hard drive boot) and also ssd. if I want a game I copy it over from the hard drive folder to the ssd and then install it on the ssd. once done with it I just uninstall and delete the folder from the ssd. that's the theory anyway, I have not needed to yet.
 
I have a 128 gb ocz vertex series and I only have starcraft 2 on here. Probably will install steam with all my games when I have the time to download them all. SC2 has had no impact on the ssd drive performance so far
 
Second: Steam only lets you install to one drive, so once steams installed on a drive, thats it, you may not move the games without re-installing steam and then re-installing from backups.
Click to expand...

Looks like you haven't heard of the "mover" utility someone developed for Steam; it uses the junction/link feature on W7 and Vista OS so that you can selectively install some Steam apps to the SSD:

http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover
 
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