Use SSD for OS or games?

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VulcaN

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 22, 2001
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I primarily use my computer for gaming, watching movies and photoshop / lightroom. I am completely satisfied with my current performance in photoshop / watching movies.

Right now I have one of the older WD Raptor 740GD's (2nd gen raptor?) as my OS drive. I was going to put one of the new 2nd gen intel 80GB SSD's (cant afford the larger version) in as my OS drive, but I was thinking... I dont really care how long my computer takes to start up, and once you're already booted up and in a game does it really matter how fast your OS can access the disk its installed on?

Yeah I can probably still squeeze 20-30GB out of the disk for games (I want to allocate at least 50GB for win7) but with the size of games these days that will barely hold my steam directory!

Id be fine keeping the OS on the older raptor (would even a 7200RPM wd caviar black be much faster these days?) and just using the SSD for games if that would net me better performance. I play a lot of flight sims and games with massive worlds (arma 2) and they really thrash the disk a lot during gameplay, even with 6GB of ram.
 
OS because games dont seem to benefit that much from SSD's where as your entire computing experience will be much better when running the OS off the ssd. Then just try and squeeze some games onto the ssd anyways.
 
Really in all honesty you want the OS on the SSD. The most HDD read-thrashing occurs on the OS drive. I would then get a large, fast drive for your games, or put them on a small RAID for speed. If you can pull a 4 drive setup (1xSSD for OS, 2xFast drive for games, 1x HUGE for swap and media file storage) then you can get some pretty impressive speeds. If you are running Vista or Windows 7 there are some other things inside the system that you can do to really tune the speed, especially in regards to the application and world loads. A lot of the white-papers are available on the SpringBoard site for Windows 7: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd361745.aspx .
 
extide said:
OS because games dont seem to benefit that much from SSD's where as your entire computing experience will be much better when running the OS off the ssd. Then just try and squeeze some games onto the ssd anyways.
Click to expand...

I'd agree that most games don't see much benefit such as call of duty where the entire map is loaded into RAM before the level starts but for games that are 20GB's on disk and have huge worlds I've seen some real world differences on my friends computer.
 
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