Solid state drive for gaming? Not worth it.

@jun_aka_pekto:

Its not really like cache in the sense of being a buffer. the drive's controller has to learn whats being used most often then it stores the most used stuff onto to the ssd part and the rest on the mechanical part.

Recording gameplay/video would not see any of the advantage of the ssd part of the sshd. Your best bet for recording without hitches is to have a dedicated drive just for that purpose. Having to accessing game data while recording on the same drive would cause the harddrive thrashing even on a sshd.

No more than any other mechanical harddrive. I know seagate's firecuda sshd's come with a 5 year warranty.

I do have a dedicated HDD just for receiving recorded video. The OS is on the SSD while the game is on a second HDD. I think having only 8 GB of RAM is one reason for the lag spikes.

My next PC will have a similar storage layout although it'll have an SSD and two SSHD plus a lot of RAM.

If that doesn't work, I'll just have to accept the STALKER X-Ray engine is crappy. ;)

@04dcarraher: thanks for the advice !

Honestly I've never had a mechanical HDD break in my life. I've heard of so many people losing data on HDDs, usb sticks, sd cards,... you name it and I've heard people have it crash. Yet I've probably owned half a dozen PCs in my life so far with two, three times that amount of HDDs and I've never lost a single byte of data :)

@R4gn4r0k:

I've seen normal drives die within a couple of hours to lasting over ten years. But the average lifespan of mechanical drives that I've seen personally is 6-8 years before you run into any real issue

well if I'm being honest, I'll just re-download the game onto a different HDD since I have pretty fast internet

I'm in the same spot as he is. It's very seldom for the hard drives I have to simply go bad. If they do go bad, it's usually after at least, 8 years of use. As hard drives wear out, they usually get louder. It's a sign to start looking for a new storage drive. Within the last 17 years, I've had only two hard drives die on me. One was a 3.5" 2001 IDE Maxtor 120 GB 10,000RPM HDD. Another was an 2.5" IDE 2005 WD 60 GB USB HDD. The Maxtor died in 2010. The 2.5" WD died in 2013. The latter had been dropped a few times. So, it was bound to go bad sooner.

In the meantime, I have older 4 GB from the late 90's and a number of 100-250 GB IDE hard drives as spares. They're useless in this age of terabyte storage and SATA. I'll be getting rid of them soon.

@xantufrog: I am tempted in getting another 1TB for RAID 0 but I don't need it, I have like 13 games installed and all I play is 2 of them right now regularly.

I don't know, people said SSD's would deteriorate in performance after years of use yet my SSD is almost 5 years in and still works like brand new.

Pretty much, so if you play BF1 today for 3 rounds of conquest or something... First load will be faster than a HDD but not as fast as a SSD, the second will get closer to SSD and the third map will be borderline indistinguishable from a SSD unless you get a stop watch out.

Worst case you still have something noticeably faster than a HDD but almost the same price, to me even the first boot with PUBG is borderline the same as a SSD.

I am really looking forward to see what comes next in the SSHD world, maybe they will double or triple the Cache to 16-24GB.

It would be nice to see the ssd storage jump to a minimum of 32gb and go as high as 128gb as an option.

So basically what I'm reading here is: You can install pretty much all your games on an SSHD, but when you play a game a lot the drive will recognize that and put the data on the Solid State part, resulting in better loader times.

Sounds like you don't even manually have to install your most played games on an SSD anymore, pretty cool !

Yeah i run most of my games off a 4tb usb 3.0 external drive and it does great. I leave my ssd just for windows alone. I’m in the minority here but I don’t care. It works great for me.

I wasn't sold at first but needed a more strorage and the Fircuda SSHD was £5 cheaper than a 1TB WD Black so I just went for it, at first I didn't move PUBG and BF1 onto the SSHD but I noticed that Fallout 4 loading so much quicker than my old HDD that I ended up uninstalling my games from SSD and moved them to the SSHD and I don't regret it at all. I wish I got the 2TB version.

Here are my benchmarks for my storage devices:

@Grey_Eyed_Elf: Thanks for sharing ! I will definitely look into this.

At first I was thinking of going with 2xSSD for my next setup, but I'd probably be better to get 1 SSD for the OS, one SSHD for games and then put in my 2 HDDs from my current PC because I'll want lots of storage too :D

What are the rules on reopening a thread over a month old exactly? :-S

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I'll say this. Try a Western Digital Black HDD. The performance with games is great. Everything is so fast. SDDs are over the top with games. For the same price, you can get multi terabyte WD B HDDs. AdobeArtist I do the same thing. A 250GB SSD for OS and programs and HDDs for storage and with a WD B for games and instrument samples.

Price/performance its the best mass storage option to go with right now, till 1TB SSD's hit the $100-150 price range they are just not worth it for gaming storage unless your wallet is unlimited for gaming.

I agree with consoles, its not worth it. For PC though the difference is huge.

I agree.

The rules are, it shouldn't be done. And when a mod posts in a necro thread, even if he wasn't the one to bump it or notice the OP date on it, he has to self flog himself.

Soooooooo..... this is gonna get messy ?