60gb SSD enough for a gaming pc?

aperture_nuig

Hey Guys,
So I like many people have been caught trying to build a new pc in the hdd shortage, which has caused me serious problems as I was hoping to build this pc on the cheap. I have roughly €100 to spend on some form of storage drive
( which in itself is too much to be paying on storage IMO[on a budget] but anyway..).

My question is: Am I as well off buy an overpriced hdd now for something that will be half price or less in a few months, or buy a 60gb ssd and buy a hdd when they're cheap again? is 60gb enough? (my current steam folder is 80gb by itself, but with a heap of stuff I don't play installed)

All opinions welcome, but I'd especially like to hear from anyone who has/ had a 60gb ssd in their gaming rig.


And BTW, I'm fully sold on the benefits of SSd's and I think they're great, but just wanted to know is it worth it in my case! Thanks

Monotype

It can be done, but you have to be careful with managing your space. Both in games and otherwise. If you stick to a bare few games, you'd get by. But if you're installing something new every week, you'll be finding yourself doing a lot of uninstalling. Be careful which drive you buy. Some of the 60GB drives are only 55GB (not taking into consideration the different measurements of 1GB = 2^30 vs 10^9 which will further reduce your capacity).

superneat

You will be fine with having a few games installed at a time, installing/uninstalling games will be very fast (ssd dependent) anyway so if you don't mind doing that...

Lots of room can be saved be turning off unneeded features if using windows, google will lead the way.

Another option i have personally done is to v-lite your windows installation disc. I made a full featured windows 7 ultimate iso 1.5 GB in size easily enough, using this tool which, when installed, took up only 5.6 GB of drive space.

Get this and you will be very pleased. Prepare to be amazed by the speed of boot and application load times. Bear in mind sata 3 support is needed to achieve maximum read/write speeds.

ShadowHearth

I would not expect hdd prices to go down for atleast 1.5 year. There were few good articles posted here before.

So I would suggest buying 120gb ssd and you will be sorted for awile if you plan on gaming only. You can always buy external hdd later ( which are cheaper, don't ask why lol ) if you need storage or movies etc.

It depends what sort of gamer you are. 60gb can be enough or not. If you plan to have 1-3 games and no other stuff, thn you can live with it for awile. If you plan to install more, then gl to you.

Remember that new games have stupid size patches. Wow, lol, bf3 etc.

SpiceWeasel

I use a 60GB SSD for Windows and a 2TB drive for everything else and it all works fine. You just have to make sure to install everything to the larger drive as I have a consistent 6 GB free on the SSD which doesn't leave room for anything aside from the OS.

FlyingIrishMan

I have a 64 (Really 63GB) SSD, and I have Windows 7 on it, all the very important Windows Updates, Google Chrome, Minecraft, lots of mods and texture packs, and TF2 (which is 10GB) and I still have 16GB of space left so I'm pretty happy with that.
What I recommend is that you burn your games onto a disc if you download them that way you can easily uninstall/re-install them without having to download them again, really handy.

Tea_Bag

while I love SSDs, I don't think at 60gb will be enough unfortunately. my windows install is 21gb. a game can take loads. the latest BF3 patch is 3.6gb. you probably have at least 10gb of music or movies, so you're stuck with 1 or 2 games and several save files. I if you had a 250gb+ external or something, it'd be bareable.

I've got an 80gb SSD and loads of junction points and all documents etc moved to the HDD, and 3 games (ACR, BF3, B:AC) and I'm down to 5gb free. a few program updates and its gone.

nesf

I couldn't live with just 60GB. My Steam folder would be 180GB and I haven't bothered to install all my games yet. And that's without taking into account my Origin folder which takes up another 20-30GB. So around 200GB taken up with definitely more to be taken up in the next year.

Then, I tend to like having quite a few games ready and waiting to be played. I can be quite capricious about what game I'll play at night etc.

Macker1

Pointless having the likes of Steam & Origin game folders on the SSD. If you are a big gamer you are always going to be struggling for space on the SSD. I have a 60GB Crucial M4 SSD which I'm delighted with due to the rapid booting and fast Windows performance. Games are installed on a seperate drive which is primarily for storage.

Dublin_Gunner

60GB just for OS and drivers maybe.

But your logic is flawed.

You state that you're trying to build on a budget - yet want an SSD. That makes no sense. Sure, HDD's have gone up in price, but you still get a LOT more storage for your money.

Hitachi Desktstar 500GB €82.70

^ would serve you a LOT better than a 60GB SSD on its own.

Spunge

Have the prices for internal SATA drives gone up recently ?
I bought a 500gb one in peats about 6 months ago i believe it was like 55 euro. Now all i see online is 80 euro +

Dublin_Gunner

Spunge wrote: »

Have the prices for internal SATA drives gone up recently ?
I bought a 500gb one in peats about 6 months ago i believe it was like 55 euro. Now all i see online is 80 euro +

Yep, there's a platter shortage or something causing the prices to rise dramatically the past while.

ShadowHearth

Spunge wrote: »

Have the prices for internal SATA drives gone up recently ?
I bought a 500gb one in peats about 6 months ago i believe it was like 55 euro. Now all i see online is 80 euro +

30 quid is not the end of the world...

We might aswell stick this to AH forum "stingiest thing people do " thread...

They won't go down in price for a good year. So just bend over, buy 500gb, then when you get your wages buy ssd. Done

Dublin_Gunner

ShadowHearth wrote: »

30 quid is not the emd of the world...

We might aswell stick this to AH forum "stingiest thing people do " thread...

They won't go down in price for a good year. So just bend over, buy 500gb, then when you get your wages buy ssd. Dome

That post was a bit unwarranted wasn't it?? Not only were you not addressing the OP, but considering a 1TB drive was ~€50 a month or two ago, nearly double that for half the storage is quite a jump.

the_syco

Spunge wrote: »

Have the prices for internal SATA drives gone up recently ?

Flooding in Thailand has caused

Dublin_Gunner wrote: »

a platter shortage or something

so normal HDDs have gone up in price. I think SSD's have stayed the same, though?

I think they I read that December to February is going to be rough, as there won't be fresh stock coming in.

/edit
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/02/us-westerndigitalcorp-idUSTRE7B106G20111202

Western Digital on Friday said it partly resumed production ahead of schedule and raised its outlook for the December quarter, prompting at least three brokerages to raise their price targets on the stock.

Seagate was the least hit among hard disk drive makers and its factories were running at full capacity after the floods.

Pictures from October: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/10/27/wd_flooded_factory/

Serephucus

SSD prices have been indirectly affected as well. The demand for them has gone up, so prices have risen about 5-10%.

@Shadowhearth, I dunno where you're getting those numbers. Indications are that by this time next year prices will have normalised somewhat. They're already coming down a bit. 2TB drives were €200, they're now about €150.

ShadowHearth

Serephucus wrote: »

SSD prices have been indirectly affected as well. The demand for them has gone up, so prices have risen about 5-10%.

@Shadowhearth, I dunno where you're getting those numbers. Indications are that by this time next year prices will have normalised somewhat. They're already coming down a bit. 2TB drives were €200, they're now about €150.

thats what was linked in other thread:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222522/Impact_of_hard_drive_shortage_to_linger_through_2013

No one can predict when they will go to normal pricing ( same as no one can predict loto numbers ), but thats what it says in this article. Article might be wrong too.

@dublin_gunner We all can Moan and bitch about prices, but in the end of the day, if you need hard drive, you will go and buy one. I biult PC a week ago and i got 60ssd and 500gb hdd, because i could not afford bigger one. For the sake of that extra few quid i will just buy that over priced HDD and enjoy my games and space, then sit with small SSD or no SSD and small HDD and have a finger sticking out in the sky and expect better prices for HDDs... When they will drop more in price i will just get one more 256GB SSD for my games and external HDD for all my Por..... i mean fotos, movies and music.

Dublin_Gunner

ShadowHearth wrote: »

thats what was linked in other thread:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222522/Impact_of_hard_drive_shortage_to_linger_through_2013

No one can predict when they will go to normal pricing ( same as no one can predict loto numbers ), but thats what it says in this article. Article might be wrong too.

@dublin_gunner We all can Moan and bitch about prices, but in the end of the day, if you need hard drive, you will go and buy one. I biult PC a week ago and i got 60ssd and 500gb hdd, because i could not afford bigger one. For the sake of that extra few quid i will just buy that over priced HDD and enjoy my games and space, then sit with small SSD or no SSD and small HDD and have a finger sticking out in the sky and expect better prices for HDDs... When they will drop more in price i will just get one more 256GB SSD for my games and external HDD for all my Por..... i mean fotos, movies and music.

lol I'm not arguing with you! It was just the tone of your post I thought was a bit un-called for!

Obviously, noone can do anything about the current HDD prices, the prices are what they are - and to be honest we've been extremely lucky the past year or 2 with the amazingly affordable storage that has been on offer.

ScumLord

SSD is great for your main drive but you need something to supplement it for actual storage. I have an 80gb with terrabytes of storage and the SSD is always threatening lack of space.

Everything defaults to the C drive so programs will be slowly eating up it's space in the background with updates without you realising it.

Shy_Dave!

I dunno if it has been said but...
If you have a newer Z68 motherboard it may have Intel Smart Response Tech.
It basically will use a small SSD as a cache for your most used apps/games.
It means you can have your OS/games and everything installed on your normal HDD but with the benefits of SSD speed.

Spunge

ShadowHearth wrote: »

30 quid is not the end of the world...

Of course not, just the first time i've ever seen an increase in a computer part price, rather than decrease.

ScumLord

Spunge wrote: »

Of course not, just the first time i've ever seen an increase in a computer part price, rather than decrease.

The parts do go up and down a fair bit, I've seen stuff go up in the past. It's just like the stock market.

Dublin_Gunner

ScumLord wrote: »

The parts do go up and down a fair bit, I've seen stuff go up in the past. It's just like the stock market.

In general, prices drop for computer parts as time goes on. Usually, you'll find it parts that have been phased out that increase in price.

ShadowHearth

Dublin_Gunner wrote: »

In general, prices drop for computer parts as time goes on. Usually, you'll find it parts that have been phased out that increase in price.

Explain ddr2 then.

It costs double of DDR3 and is way slower, older. In fact all ram are effected by it. Older parts get more expencive as it gets more rare. Same with older gen mobos and CPUs.

Parts newer just drop in price. The post earlyer gave a very good example: it's like stock market.

For example: I had 2500k CPU in my basket for few days, when I finnaly was going to place my order it went up 5 quid up...

Edit: lol my bad, you said same thing.

Dublin_Gunner

ShadowHearth wrote: »

Explain ddr2 then.

It costs double of DDR3 and is way slower, older. In fact all ram are effected by it. Older parts get more expencive as it gets more rare. Same with older gen mobos and CPUs.

Parts newer just drop in price. The post earlyer gave a very good example: it's like stock market.

For example: I had 2500k CPU in my basket for few days, when I finnaly was going to place my order it went up 5 quid up...

Edit: lol my bad, you said same thing.

That's exactly what I said. DDR2 has been phased out, and is far more expensive than DDR3.

Mantel

I'm going down the 60gb SSD route simply because it's the only SSD I can afford at the moment and with the platter shortage it doesn't look like they're going to get cheaper in the next six months. It's one of those drives that's really 55gb though, toss on 21gb for windows and that leaves me with a bit under 34gb to play with. Really should leave 5-10gb free for swap space so that's down to 24gb now. Add in steam and that space is gobbled up so a 60gb SSD on it's own for gaming isn't really worth it unless you only play one game. I'll have a 500gb drive sitting beside it so that will handle it and some network attached storage for music/movies.

There should be some guides out there that allow you to install steam on the SSD and have the games reside on the other drive, a handy feature I might take advantage of if I want to have more than one or two games available to play.

ScumLord

Mantel wrote: »

There should be some guides out there that allow you to install steam on the SSD and have the games reside on the other drive, a handy feature I might take advantage of if I want to have more than one or two games available to play.

you can change that in steams settings you can have change where the download and install folders go to.

Serephucus

ScumLord wrote: »

you can change that in steams settings you can have change where the download and install folders go to.

I wasn't aware this could be done, and I can't see it in settings anywhere. Link/proof, etc.?

PseudoFamous

Serephucus wrote: »

I wasn't aware this could be done, and I can't see it in settings anywhere. Link/proof, etc.?

Move everything in your steam folder to a different drive, delete everything in there other than steam.exe and your steamapps folder, open steam, it will update, and all downloads from there in will end up in the new location.


EDIT: From the mouth of valve

Dublin_Gunner

Serephucus wrote: »

I wasn't aware this could be done, and I can't see it in settings anywhere. Link/proof, etc.?

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7710-TDLC-0426

1. Log out and exit Steam
2. Navigate to the folder where Steam is installed (by default: C:\Program Files\Steam\)
3. Delete all of the files and folders except the SteamApps folder and Steam.exe
4. Cut and paste your Steam folder to the new location, for example: \Games\Steam\
5. Launch Steam
6. Steam will briefly update and then you will be ready to play
7. All future game content will be downloaded to the new folder \Games\Steam\Steamapps\

nesf

PseudoFamous wrote: »

Move everything in your steam folder to a different drive, delete everything in there other than steam.exe and your steamapps folder, open steam, it will update, and all downloads from there in will end up in the new location.

That's moving Steam though, not changing the install directory from within Steam. From what I know you have to move Steam you can't put the Steam exe in one drive and have games install in another.

Dublin_Gunner

nesf wrote: »

That's moving Steam though, not changing the install directory from within Steam. From what I know you have to move Steam you can't put the Steam exe in one drive and have games install in another.

Hardly an issue though.


I never install anything to my OS drive personally, so not an issue for me. Its a practice most people should observe if you have an OS and a storage drive.

OS drive only for OS & drivers, storage drive for everything else.

nesf

Dublin_Gunner wrote: »

Hardly an issue though.


I never install anything to my OS drive personally, so not an issue for me. Its a practice most people should observe if you have an OS and a storage drive.

OS drive only for OS & drivers, storage drive for everything else.

Sure, I'd be the same but the point made was:

There should be some guides out there that allow you to install steam on the SSD and have the games reside on the other drive, a handy feature I might take advantage of if I want to have more than one or two games available to play.

Dublin_Gunner

I agree, its a bit silly. Any other program that downloads files has the option to choose where they store them, from download managers, to even the crappyness that is Origin.

nesf

Dublin_Gunner wrote: »

I agree, its a bit silly. Any other program that downloads files has the option to choose where they store them, from download managers, to even the crappyness that is Origin.

Yup, extremely annoying.

Serephucus

That's not what he was asking. He wants to install Steam somewhere, and having games (some or all, I'm not sure) on another drive. AFAIK, this can't be done*.

*Unless you want to start using junction points or something, but I don't know how Steam would handle this, as some files would still be in the common folder, necessary for certain games to work.

Tea_Bag

junction points work well at that. I don't fully understand it or use them, but NTMK uses them to move steam games around depending on which games hes playing and it works well. you don't have the problem with app data because as far as windows cares its still on your C drive which is the beauty of it.

EDIT:

for the annoying problem of stuff automatically installing to your SSD without prompting you, you can do a regedit that changes your default installation drive. google is your friend.

Dublin_Gunner

Serephucus wrote: »

That's not what he was asking. He wants to install Steam somewhere, and having games (some or all, I'm not sure) on another drive. AFAIK, this can't be done*.

*Unless you want to start using junction points or something, but I don't know how Steam would handle this, as some files would still be in the common folder, necessary for certain games to work.

No, not exactly, but the end result is the same - freeing up space on the OS drive.

It only takes a minute to do, and to the end user, everything is exactly the same, but games stored on the storage drive.

Monotype

Doesn't steam give you the option initially to install it where you want to? This would have the same result as just moving to a different drive. I've never had it on the C-Drive so it must give you the option.

You can move the sub folders for the individual games using junction points as Serephucus/TB points out and this program will make it easy for you.
http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover/

Serephucus

Monotype wrote: »

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

That is an absolutely kick-ass little app!

nesf

Monotype wrote: »

You can move the sub folders for the individual games using junction points as Serephucus/TB points out and this program will make it easy for you.
http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover/

Thank you very much.

Edit: Bah doesn't work with Skyrim on my machine for some reason.

-( i )- Wicker

Someone pointed me to SteamTool before, but I haven't tried it yet so I can't vouch for its reliability. The guy who pointed me to it says it works well though

Mantel

Monotype wrote: »

You can move the sub folders for the individual games using junction points as Serephucus/TB points out and this program will make it easy for you.
http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover/

Nice one, thanks Monotype.

Wonder how much hassle it would be to have a game or two on the SSD and the rest on the HDD. I'll have a good play around once the SSD arrives.

kowloon

Have a 160GB SSD for OS and 3DS Max, everything fits fine.
Steam folder and other progs go on a WD Black SATAIII which more than does the trick. Have a slower 2TB drive for movies, music etc.

Could easily do without the 2TB drive if I burnt things to disk more often, and I could do without the SSD. Having enough space on the faster HDD is essential.

kilianmanning

Anybody know if ssd prices are going to fall at all? Thinking of buying a 128gb for my hp but they're just so expensive:(

ShadowHearth

I doubt we will see anything drastic pricing wise.

Nothing out there that would make it faster or bigger. Still huge demand and reletively new thing in pc world.

128gb is not that much. You ca get one for 150eu ish? Well worth it for what it is.

Serephucus

Actually for the M4, it's closer to €170-€180, but you can get SF3 drives for around that, yeah.

Monotype

Unlikely that we'll see much drop any time soon. I'd say demand is good with hard drives being so dear.

I haven't heard of any big releases on the horizon so not much pressure there.

It wouldn't be in any manufacturer's interest to cut prices by a lot as the others would follow and everyone would be worse off (apart from the consumer). They don't make huge margins on the drives anyway and it's likely that the ones using the sandforce controllers need to make some money back with all the returns and problems.

A few months down the road, hard drive pricing should be back to normal and we may see a new series of HDDs. Demand for SSDs might drop off and with a price decrease accordingly.

Fluffy88

kilianmanning wrote: »

Anybody know if ssd prices are going to fall at all? Thinking of buying a 128gb for my hp but they're just so expensive:(

I asked the same question before Christmas and Mono gave an answer that was dead on. So I would listen to what he is saying now again.

On the other hand the Crucial M4 is now €2.59 cheaper than it was before Christmas!! :O

I found dabs to be the cheapest by far(ish) for a Crucial M4.
http://www.dabs.ie/products/crucial-128gb-m4-sata-6gb-s-2-5--solid-state-drive-7GL1.html?refs=56350000-50090&src=3

kilianmanning

Okay, think i'm going to purchase a crucial m4 because from lurking around the pc building and upgrading forum they seem to be best and most reliable:pfrom dabs they're even cheaper than amazon! it wouldn't be worth ordering from hwvs just for an ssd would it?

Genghiz Cohen

Probably not, unless it was +€30 cheaper.

Also Steam Mover, in case it hasn't been mentioned.
Installed Steam + games on my 250GB HDD and moved Skyrim over to my SSD to get crazy fast load times.