Is a Solid State Hard Drive any good for gaming if you're in a budget?

Is a Solid State Hard Drive any good for gaming if you're in a budget or do you guys prefer HDD instead? SSD is kind of expensive for me.

 

Hybrid drives generally perform better than a standard 5400 RPM hard drive, but they only have a noticeable performance advantage if you're accessing the same programs over and over again. I just put one in my Clevo but to use for media and games that don't benefit otherwise benefit from being on a normal SSD. Further, the drive is 7mm tall, therefore I could fit another in the second drive bay. The more popular HGST 1 TB 7200 RPM non-SSHD drive is 9.5mm, so I would only be able to fit one in the system.

 

SSHDs have proved to be highly unreliable in my experience - I'd advise against them.

 

Is any reason why?

 

Every one of them that I've seen has failed within 6-8 months of regular use - even higher end ones - I'd suggest getting a 750GB-1TB HDD and a 128GB SSD combo - much better performance and higher reliability.

 

@ saturnotaku @ don_svetlio

I guess SSHD is not option atm, guess I'll have to save up some more for an SSD.

Anyways, do you guys know if there is any benefit having a separate SSD e.g 120GB SSD NVME (OS) and another 500GB SSD NVME (games, and media) or should you guys rather prefer to have a 1 TB SSD NVME instead?

 

Probably not - at least I haven't noticed a difference between using a separate drive for games and not. Also, you could get a SATA 3 SSD and lower the price that way.

 

SSD aren't that expenisve if you looking at 256-512 those are affordable but you still want to buy a 1-2tb HDD because the cost/mb is less here until SSD 1-2tb comes down to 1-2tb HDD then I would wait for those. The real benefits from from a SSD(main) and HDD(secondary) is data protections because for my desktop the SSD is the boot and install running software and the HDD is the game saves and data file saves so should the SSD go bad or die suddenly-all I lost are just the software install that can be reinstalled on a new SSD and get back going. What else I do is use Acronics 2014 to create a backup image of the SSD installs when doing a clean update and make a image of that so should the SSD need replacing all I do is reimage back the working image and I get going right away without delay. Only higher priced laptops give you two bays or some switch out the OD for a HDD not SSD for extra storage capacity but remember a HDD in the OD will be slower then a direct Sata that was made for SSD/HDD connections. Also to use M.2 cards would first mean your system must has that option otherwise it would be a 2.5 SSD unit first as the main drive.

 

It all depends on the game. Open world titles like GTA V, FarCry 4, and others show significant improvements in load times when run from a SSD. Other modern AAA games with large install sizes, such as Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and CoD: Infinite Warfare have been the same, at least on my machines.

 

My experience with BF4 was that loading times went down from several minutes to couple dozen seconds.
Back then it was a huge advantage, as there was no waiting period at the start. Those with SSDs would capture several flags already before others got into game.

 

Here's a video with a variety of games showing the differences. Some of them are pretty crazy.

 

SSDs are much cheaper than they used to be because of the competition between manufacturers. You can get 240-256GB SSDs on amazon for like $70-$90 which are very affordable and use your HDD as data storage but only if your laptop has a msata/M.2 slot (for SSDs) or space for the SATA drive. Tbh buying a 2nd SSD for data storage is a waste of money as a lot of games wont take full advantage of an SSD and ofc same goes other things like Movies, Photos, Music and other stuff.

My current configuration is like having a SSHD because i have a 24gb SSD which is used as a cache drive. My laptop's boot time/shutdown time is fast as a SSD as long im not installing windows updates nor booting up from a improper shutdown otherwise it boots up like an HDD which is painfully slow until it learns everything again

 

Bear in mind this is only true for fairly old (4-5 yrs+ machines) nowadays...


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Coming from someone who had an HP laptop with a slow 5400 rpm hard drive. I would say a 7200 RPM HDD is enough for loading time and storage. I have a game that loaded within 1-2 minutes on My old HP laptop and load within 15-25 seconds in my laptop that has a 7200 RPM HDD along with an Nvidia GPU with Shader Cache on to make my games load faster as well. I can't ask for anything more than that.

 

Save up and keep the hard drive and buy an ssd next year


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Games are really not the main point of buying an SSD. As stated before it depends on the game thats why i think its a waste of money to buy a huge sized SSD just to improve loading times in games. With your system you really should buy lets say a 240-256GB SSD just to greatly improve your system performance while keeping the HDD as your storage drive