Disc Hard Drive vs SSD

[Apolyc]

So i currently have a 3 or 4 TB hard drive, but i keep hearing how much better SSD's are so im thinking of switching. The thing is if i want one with a similar capacity i will be spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars. To get an SSD for a reasonable price would only be like 250 or so gigs. SO what makes them so much better? Is it worth downgrading that much storage space?

[EyelessCrow]

Buy an affordable SSD, put your OS and a few games you play regularly on it, leave your other HD in your PC for extra storage space for other game/other files.

EDIT: I guess I should answer your other question though I'm sure others will post before I edit, your loading speed for everything on your SSD will be a lot faster. Format your old SSD and put stuff you don't care about in regards to speed on it.

[Gorgodeus]

Main advantage to an SSD is faster loading screens. While in game there really isn't any noticeable difference other than that.

You dont need a huge SSD. You only want your OS and games that you want fast load screens on it. Everything else can go on a regular HDD.

[Kagthul]

So i currently have a 3 or 4 TB hard drive, but i keep hearing how much better SSD's are so im thinking of switching. The thing is if i want one with a similar capacity i will be spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars. To get an SSD for a reasonable price would only be like 250 or so gigs. SO what makes them so much better? Is it worth downgrading that much storage space?

If you have the money to spend on it, and your rig already meets all of your other performance metrics, adding an SSD as a convenience is a fine choice. What im confused about is why you would throw the other drive away. Surely you can fit more than one drive in your machine? (Since you can add an SSD almost anywhere - even tape it or COmmand Strip it down somewhere)

As for "so much better" - meh? Faster loading times. That's it. OS response will be snappier, and your boot times will be very fast. It wlil not, however, make your games perform better. You wont get one single FPS more, it wont make textures look nicer, nadda.

If you have the cash, and your rig does everything else you want it to - go for it.

If there are other areas where you could upgrade your rig and get real performance upgrades - do that instead.

[Lathais]

As stated, it's not a replacement for your standard drive, you'll still want that for storage. It's way faster at loading though. You put your OS and the games you play most frequently on it then leave everything else on your HDD.

As for "way faster," yes, it is. My computer can be powered off and I can turn it on and have a browser open in under 10 seconds. I can reboot and load back in to a game really really fast. So fast, people do not believe I rebooted. Some games do not benefit as greatly from it, but those that do it is very noticeable. Just look on youtube for some game loading comparison vids.

[Kagthul]

I'd also add that you can get the Boot time/OS/basic applications loading/responding faster benefit from an SSHD (Solid-State Hybrid Drive), which has a small solid state portion (between 8-32GB depending on the model you get, unless you get one of Apple's "Fusion Drives" which are 128GB of SSD) that it intelligently stores your OS and most used apps/data on.

It wont affect game loading because the games are usually too large to load onto the relatively small Solid State portion of the drive, but you get pretty much all the other benefits of an SSD for general use; and they are only about 15$ more expensive than a traditional HDD of the same size. I recently put a 2TB SSHD in my gaming rig (i needed a new primary drive as my old 750GB 10,000RPM drive was getting full) because it was on sale cheaper than traditional drive of the same size and im very impressed. I will probably not ever use a traditional HDD as a primary again, given that the premium for SSHD is so low (~15$).

Right now, full-up SSDs are still something id consider a pure luxury given the absurd premium you pay for so little space, but like i said, if you've got the money and your rig is hitting your desired performance goals, go for it.

[vindicatorx]

So i currently have a 3 or 4 TB hard drive, but i keep hearing how much better SSD's are so im thinking of switching. The thing is if i want one with a similar capacity i will be spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars. To get an SSD for a reasonable price would only be like 250 or so gigs. SO what makes them so much better? Is it worth downgrading that much storage space?

Do you actually need a HDD that big? I mean I have a 256GB SSD on mine and a 1TB HDD and I haven't even used 10 gigs on the HDD. Then again I don't torrent things and don't store much on my pc. I picked up a Samsung evo 500GB for $160 for my new build and I'll still put in the same HDD I have now but doubt I use it. SSD is a shitload faster for loading

[ComputerNerd]

A mechanical drive takes a lot of time to move the head to the right location before it starts reading.
That "seeking" can be quite considerable during reads which move the head about a lot, termed random reads as they are not from adjacent or "sequential" locations on the platter.
SSD's do not need to physically move a head, so on random reads which are more representative of most reading you do from the drive will have a vastly shorter delay before the actual reading.

An SSHD (Solid State Hybrid Drive) is a mechanical drive using some flash memory to cache the most commonly read data on the drive.
If you are pretty consistent in what you read regularly, you will see more benefit.
Less so if it is changing often.

Do you actually need a HDD that big? I mean I have a 256GB SSD on mine and a 1TB HDD and I haven't even used 10 gigs on the HDD. Then again I don't torrent things and don't store much on my pc. I picked up a Samsung evo 500GB for $160 for my new build and I'll still put in the same HDD I have now but doubt I use it. SSD is a shitload faster for loading

I have a lot of old stuff to clear out yet, but in reinstalling windows to a 250GB SSD for the first time I had 200GB of stuff to backup from and restore to the mechanical drive.
Before the restore when the mechanical drive was the only drive, and before major cleanup/uninstall session it was about 800GB.
Unfortunately my only means of backing up was a 160GB usb external drive, and a 250GB archos media player, hence the reduction.

Dont try to put everything on your SSD.
Stuff which wont benefit from the faster reads, music, documents, etc should stay on the mechanical as well as some games which should be judged on a per-game basis.
Steam allows you to define multiple installation folders so you can install to one of your choice.
Origin doesn't offer that, but you can change it in the settings before each installation.

[Apolyc]

Thank you all for the responses, i really appreciate it.

With that said i would like to ask one more question.

It sounds like my best option would be to get an SSD and just put my OS and most played games on it. My question for that is, what will happen with all of my current settings? Addons i have downloaded for the games. Things like curse should go on my SSD or HDD?

Im sorry if these are basic questions, but i have never done two hard drives in he same computer before.

[Artorius]

Thank you all for the responses, i really appreciate it.

With that said i would like to ask one more question.

It sounds like my best option would be to get an SSD and just put my OS and most played games on it. My question for that is, what will happen with all of my current settings? Addons i have downloaded for the games. Things like curse should go on my SSD or HDD?

Im sorry if these are basic questions, but i have never done two hard drives in he same computer before.

You can choose where to install things with the setup wizard. If you feel like you don't need the extra loading speed at program X, just put it at the hard drive.
Things like Photoshop and Visual Studio I'd totally leave at the SSD just to be able to open them faster, same for your Web browser and most programs actually.

I think you can install you everyday use programs at the SSD just fine and keep file storing and games at the hard drive, it depends on how big your SSD is. 250gb should be plenty for OS + programs.

[Apolyc]

You can choose where to install things with the setup wizard. If you feel like you don't need the extra loading speed at program X, just put it at the hard drive.
Things like Photoshop and Visual Studio I'd totally leave at the SSD just to be able to open them faster, same for your Web browser and most programs actually.

I think you can install you everyday use programs at the SSD just fine and keep file storing and games at the hard drive, it depends on how big your SSD is. 250gb should be plenty for OS + programs.

So what would that mean for me? Would i have to reinstall my OS? What would happen with my current files and settings? Should i backup everything on my external hard drive first?

[EyelessCrow]

So what would that mean for me? Would i have to reinstall my OS? What would happen with my current files and settings? Should i backup everything on my external hard drive first?

I would back them up yes, but there are tools out there to clone your HD to your new SSD and then just reformat your old drive and then take your files off of your SSD and move them to your now clean HD to free up SSD space. Or if you want a clean install just back it up, and boot to your SSD with install media.

[Malkiah]

So what would that mean for me? Would i have to reinstall my OS? What would happen with my current files and settings? Should i backup everything on my external hard drive first?

okay so...
if you get an SSD for your OS, yes you would need to install the OS on the SSD drive.
so, you would plug your new SSD drive into your computer, put a windows install disc in your CD drive, and install windows to the new drive.
once windows has finished installing and you're at the brand new clean install of windows, it SHOULD have automatically set it up so that your SSD drive is C:, and the old big drive is D:
when you install windows, it makes you create an account name - this ends up being a folder that contains all your windows settings.
if you bought your computer with windows pre-installed, for you this is likely either Admin or some username you picked (you can check ahead of time by going to C:\users - if you don't know what profile you're running just check the folders inside \users\, your profile folder is the one with stuff in it)
so what you'll do is you have this clean install of windows... you'll then go into your D drive (which is your old HD) and go to users, into the folder that has all your stuff in it - move the contents of that folder into the new C:\users\usernameyoumake folder, and all your windows settings will be loaded.
however, you will need to reinstall a ton of stuff, because this copy moves all your settings but not all your programs, stuff like adblock and firefox and chrome and what not.
this is how you do a settings copy manually without having to do a backup or mess with an external drive.

so basically once you do that and reinstall whatever custom apps you may have, all your data will still be sitting on your old drive, which is now D.
windows will boot in the new SSD drive and be MUCH faster, and you can keep all your game data on your older drive.
you may need to reinstall some executable programs into the new SSD drive, but all you need to do is run the game installer and then just launch wow out of your D drive and all your addons and everything will still be there.
for example, for wow, you would just need to install the battle.net launcher, and then for each game there's an option to point to an existing installation folder - you'd just click that and go to the game folder on the D drive and not need to fully reinstall the game.
some games may also require you to run the setup.exe for that game to get it into your windows programs list, but you won't need to redownload patch data and what not, just get the executable installed to windows.

[anntheman]

Your 'ram' is your main memory. Your HDD/SSD is your secondary memory. As the speed of SSD's increase, the necessity of the traditional memory becomes obsolete. So, why is the SSD better? It loads faster into your memory and writes to the disk are also faster. So, depending on your system's bottleneck, this is very advantageous for anything dealing with reading and writing from and to your secondary memory device. If your hard drive is your bottleneck, which is most commonly the case for notebook drives, you essentially will optimize the performance of your primary memory, as well.