Think I'm ready to take the SSD plunge (gaming related)

A

AmberClad

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 19, 2005
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Welp, I've just completely filled up my Vraptor array which is currently dedicated to my Steam collection. Just a portion of Steam, mind you. By my calculations, I'd need another couple hundred GB to fit the rest of my Steam games as well. I'm probably going to have to just dump the entire thing onto my 1TB Spinpoint, and hope by the time I fill that up, the price of standard HDDs won't be sky high anymore.

So that brings me to considering getting an SSD to install both Win7 and a select handful of symlinked games on.

- How are prices on these right now? I'm not buying at a high point am I?
- I'm thinking 128GB should be sufficient size to fit both an OS and some games on?

Just looking for thoughts, suggestions, maybe a little bit of push to "go for it" :D.
 
I've found 120GB to be an ideal size for WIndows + my major programs + 4 or 5 symlinked Steam games (I use SteamMover to automate the process).
 
m4 or c300 would be my two choices whichever you can get cheaper.

You will notice more of a difference in your os, apps than gaming I think.
 
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Don't go any smaller than 120GB, but that is a decent size. Either the Crucial M4 128GB or the Samsung 830 120GB are good buys right now.
 
Crucial M4? Just make sure you have a good firmware on it, and you'll be fine.

If you're fine with handling the management of the SSD, using symbolic links or otherwise, then go for it. I think that's too much work, and I don't trust myself to know which data is actually important. My solution is to use either Hybrid HDDs for boot + app drives, or to use a dedicated cache drive. I let software determine which logical blocks of my filesystems are important enough to live in the cache. This method offers the majority of the performance benefit of running off of SSDs alone, but without having to manage two disks, symbolic links, or disk-space issues.

If you have a Z68 system, then a 64GB Crucial M4 or similar will do a fantastic job as a cache drive. Otherwise, there are various software packages that can substitute it.

The most important thing is that your cache be persistent through reboots. Some solutions do not allow this. I wish NTFS were like ZFS and allowed the use of SSD caching natively.
 
Alright I put in the order for the Crucial M4 (128GB) at Newegg :). Amazon has it at the same price, but I can never be sure when I use the free shipping option at Amazon if it's going to end up taking a few days or a couple weeks. Got the UPS tracking number already, so hopefully I'll have it by the end of the week, if not earlier.
 
Welcome to the club.

As an early adopter of SSD's I will tell you it is painful to go back to using a mechanical drive after you get used to your SSD.

It won't help with your games much, but you will love what it does for booting and using Windows.

Don
 
I've got Skyrim on my 128GB M4, linked via NTFS Junction to my Steam folder on my WD Black drive. Win7 is using <30GB, and Skyrim is only taking up 5.75GB more. I don't notice a drastic change in Skyrim map loading times, but there does seem to be an improvement. The most noticeable improvement is the smoothness while actually playing, but it could be because the OS is smoother behind the scenes. Either way, I'm not going back!
 
If you are buying in soon, get a Samsung 830 128gb, if you can wait a week or two check see Crucial fixes the 5k hour bug with new firmware, or if you can wait a little longer, probably ends of January or beginning of February, Intel will release their 520, which is suppose to be fastest ssd in the market, and backed by intel should be pretty decent, even if its Sanforce based.
 
Ugh. I installed the new SSD, closed up the case, did an HD Tune run. Then realized I connected it to the wrong SATA III port (the Marvell chipset one, not the Intel). This motherboard has the most horrific SATA port layout and I have to remove my tri-slot GTX570 to access any of them.

Edit: Failed again. I connected the two DVD drives to the SATA III ports and the M4 to the SATA II. Opening my case again...

Edit 2: Third time's the charm. 362.1 MB/s read, finally.

I'm going to go to bed before I do anything else stupid :rolleyes:.
 
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