Hi All, I'm thinking of buying an SSD to replace my OS drive, but I am a little concerned about data loss if I use the SSD for my games (specifically, I hammer WoT quite a bit sometimes ) What do you use your SSDs for? Is it just for rapid OS loading times or do you use them for your most played games? Any advice would be appreciated. Andy
Through tests I have ran, SSD will benefit games but most notably cpu intensive games such as fsx. an SSD over improved texture loading in fsx by over 30% compared to a hdd black caviar. Other games not so well but good nonetheless.
I'm thinking of buying an SSD to replace my OS drive, but I am a little concerned about data loss if I use the SSD for my games
I've got my OS on an SSD, but also have BF3 on there. It halved my load times for that game, from being on a samsung F3 before.
I'd certainly get one big enough to put your programs and games on too. Obviously you can't have many installed at once if you get a 120 Gb drive, but it makes a big different to loading times. What do you mean about the data loss, do you mean in terms of the write endurance by writing lots of data? If so, I wouldn't worry. You can write a few gigabytes per day and still have it last for years. Plus modern drives usually have toolbox software that can monitor the health and tell you the life remaining.
Right i've just edited this as i've looked up World of Tanks... Now, the launcher works as a torrent client - uploading & download (potentially) many GB of data - so, on the basis of this, i would personally not install this onto a SSD. The reason for this is that, rather than downloading as a single incremental file, torrents work by requesting (comparatively) tiny parts from available sources &, along with potentially attempting to download the same parts from several sources (esp if there's an error with a part or a source goes offline or...) which can dramatically increases the amount of data being written, the way the parts are combined isn't incremental in the same way which will dramatically increase the amount of data being written. This will apply to any game which uses a similar p2p protocol &, naturally, to the use of p2p clients more generally. Moving away from this specific type of instance though, with 'normal' games installed alongside an OS, providing you keep a reasonable amount of free space & either buy a SSD with at least 7% OP or manually give it 7% OP by under partitioning then there's no reason not to have games on there... ...well, i have done since 2009. [NB 7% is the minimum OP i'd recommend - esp with heavier write loads, the more the better - though you'd want to up the free space to ~20% first.] Otherwise, whatever type of storage device you buy there is always the chance of data loss for various reasons & this is no different if you're using a SSD or HDD or floppies or SD cards or... - the way to minimise it is to have a decent backup regieme... ...though of course that doesn't protect data from catastrophic events or theft or...
I have my OS, all the programs I use often such as word, photoshop, internet and games that have long loading times such as bf3 and kingdoms of amalur. Load times are great, and once I'm done with a game I can just transfer it over to my standard HD.
Yeah it makes a big difference in super heavy duty games with many high resolution textures, but for many slightly older games the difference is slight, maybe a few seconds at most. However, if the SSD is big enough, there's no reason not to put a few games on it. If you use Steam, for example, you can use NTFS links to link the .GCF's from the SSD to the Steamapps folder.
I am in the process of doing a new build and intend to keep the OS and 'game/data' drive separate which means two SSDs. Then a big 2TB drive for everything else.
