Gaming Hard Drive question

i plan on getting a pretty good gaming laptop, i dont plan on storing music, movies, videos on the laptop. i simply want to run most demanding games easily and efficiently and run programs like Chrome as fast as possible. I was looking to get 2 SSD as primary and secondary hard drives for speed, temp and quietness, and i want to get the RAID-0 for it to be more efficient. i want to try to keep the price down as much as possible so, will 2 60gb SSD drives be enough for what i want to do?

 

If it's just OS + browsers + maybe like 6-8 games, you should be okay with 120GB of space (2x 60GB SSD in RAID 0)

 

i see but i usually will only be playing 1 game at a time, so im assuming it will be ok

 

The storage drive(s) come into play when disk access is required - for you that means booting the computer up, loading programs and loading levels in games; all of this will be significantly faster with an SSD vs. a hard drive.

I suggest a single large drive instead of a RAID 0 setup; RAID 0 isn't as reliable as a single drive.

What notebook are you looking at?

 

To add, storage drives basically don't affect gaming that much at all, just loading times (which are relatively short as is for most games).

RAID, imo, is pointless when SSDs are considered, since SATAIII SSDs are already stupid fast on their own. Like what Charles said, I'd just consider a 120GB or larger SATAIII SSD.

 

RAID 0 really does not help too much. If you are purchasing gaming laptop, I'd suggest you get a single larger SSD instead.

 

prob the sager np9170, so are u saying no second hard drive and just a SSD thats 120gb or more?

 

Sounds good. Use the stock HDD for bulk storage or something, so that you don't always have to switch out install files every time your tastes change

 

im sorry im completely stupid and confused, so what exactly would be the best primary hard drive for me and is there a secondary hard drive? so dumb so sorry i just want to double check so im not wasting money

 

If you plan on upgrading your computer with a new drive, you should have the aftermarket SSD as the primary drive (for the performance boost that SSDs offer). So when you get the drive, you need to take the stock HDD out of the primary bay and replace it with the SSD, then install Windows on it (either a clean install or migrate your OEM install over; either way you can still reuse the OEM copy of Windows, so you don't need to buy another OS). Then, with Windows installed, wipe the stock HDD clean and stick it into the secondary bay (iirc the m17x has two hard drive bays, else stick it where the optical drive is if you don't need the optical drive). So you'll have your OS and programs installed on the SSD, and have save files, songs, videos, whatever else on the mechanical hard drive. No RAID involved.

 

Also, RAID0=no TRIM=SSD performance degradation. I've heard this was a very recent addition to desktop Z77 chipsets so I doubt it will come to laptop chipsets. For gaming, stick with a 256gb SSD which is plenty big for a couple of big titles. Then, invest in a 7200RPM HDD for the 2nd slot (the largest you can afford) to keep all your game ISOs and random tidbits that aren't going to be used very often. You never know when you need the extra GBs of storage for a mobile machine.

 

i think i got it now much appreciated