Perhaps Going All SSD... looking for experiences and advice

[Skroe]

Hey folks,

So I'm considering going all SSD pretty shortly. I'm doing a rather major cleaning / rewiring / re-layout of my gaming computer next week and I'm taking the opportunity to re-evaluate my approach to use it.

Right now my storage solutions are as follows:

1. 250gb SSD (C:\) Samsung 850 EVO with Windows, productivity programs and all Blizzard Games I play. 83GB free still
2. 120GB SSD #1, an OCZ Vertex 3 with half my favorite games (all Steam). The was my first SSD. 4gb free
3. 120GB SSD #2 with OCZ Vertex 3 with the other half of my favorite games (all Steam)10gb free
4. 1TB WD Black HDD 7200RPM with the bulk of my steam library (games I play occasionally and the other huge, 50gb games), Origin, and some other misc games. 250gb free
5. 3TB WD Green HDD 5400RPM with my work on it, my music, my books and most importantly, my huge movie and TV collection, making up 1.8TB of the drive's 3TB space. 375gb free
   

So that's 5 drives, 3 SSDs, 2 HDDs, for a total of 4.5TB, of which 500gb is SSD.


Here is a spacesniffer image of my drive so you can see the breakdown:
http://imgur.com/6oczjK2


Right now my usage approach is:
Total Games (across all drives) = 688gb+100gb+100gb+84gb +80= 1052gb
Movies + Comics = 1.4tb + 400gb = 1.8tb
Music = 95gb
Work and personal related files = ~100gb.

So minus movies and comics, the total comes to 1.247TB

I'm trying to rethink my approach and am wondering about people's advice/experiences in making an all-SSD shift or consolidaitng drives down from 5. I build computers for my guild regularly (they buy the parts, send them to me, I build, send to them) and have become pretty envious of the simplicity of the all-SSD approach I've been doing for them (a single 500gb SSD), which is more than enough considering how guildies use it. 5 drives means more power connectors and an untidy internal design. As far as everyday usage goes, I don't like how everything is spread out with games on 4 of the 5 drives, media in all different places and so forth.. I don't like having two hard drives taking up physcial space in the case where I could tuck the SSDs (a Corsair Vengeance C70). The performance between the 1TB WD Black and 3TB Green are very close, so I could ditch either one in theory, if I can re-think how I use them.

Although I'd like to go all SSD, a consulation prize if that is unfeasible would be to consolidate into one HDD (probably the green) from the two and do something about the two small SSDs.

One option is I could replace the two 120GB Vertex 3s with a 500gb SSD. That would cost $150. I'd consolidate the 2x120gb with AAA games onto one drive, and move to it some of the AAA games currently the 1TB WD Black and remove the WD Black, I'd drop from five drives to three (the 250gb SSD, the 500gbSSD and the 3TB Green) if I did nothing else. That would be a shift from 4.5TB of space with 500g being SSD to 3.75TB of Space with 750gb being SSD. It would be "more elegant" at the cost of 750gb of space, and I'd have to be more selective with what I had installed. Simply having a 50gb game I installed play very rarely wouldn't be an option anymore.

Getting rid of both the HDDs (losing 4TB of my total 4.5TB) and replacing them with a 500GB SSD may be possible. I'd have to be even more selective about my games I install and uninstall. And I'd have to keep my 50gb of work and 100GB of iTunes music on an SSD, but that's fine. The biggest shift would be moving the green drive to my other computer, and playing moves over Plex, from the neighboring computer over the network. Worth it you think?

Regardless, I think my goal is, I'd like to go from 5 drives to 3, do something about the 2 SSDs and 2 HDDs and not drop an extraordinary amount of money in the process. The "nuclear" option is to get a 500gb SSD ($150) and a 6GB WD Blue ($200), but I'd prefer to hold off on that unless I had no choice. My 3TB green should be enough IF I do indeed need to keep a drive, if I use it differently/smarter. But that 1TB Black and the two 120gb SSDs have got to go.

SO let's talk specific questions now that I kind of explained how I use it and some options:

-Am I archaic and doing something pointless in 2016 by having a massive movies/tv folder (mostly h.265 at that), especially one located within my main desktop when I can put it into the one next to it? What are my options (beyond subscribing to netflix?). Solving this would reduce the "space requirement" by 1.6TB

-Am I wrong for wanting to rid myself of the old 2x 120gb SSDs (as in, any SSD is an SSD worth putting in a computer)?

-Am I creating a needless problem for myself I'm attempting to solve by mostly throwing money at by keeping an absolutely huge amount of steam games (including large 30-50gb games) installed? Do people not do this / is it a bad computer usage habit now days? How do you keep your games library?

-Is it really worth taking the dive from a 3tb Green to a 6tb blue for $200 given what I wrote above?

-If I went a 250gb SSD +500gb SSD + 3TB HDD route, what would be some useful organizational rules / approaches? Especially with regards to movies and games

- Instead of the nuclear option of buying a 500gb SSD ($150) and a 6TB HDD ($200), what about just spending $300 on a 1TB SSD instead and going with the 250+1TB SSDs + 3TB HDD? Would that be a better, more future proof way of doing things?

-And the biggest question of all, is there anyway for ~$300 or less, with my 250gb SSD, my two 120gb SSDs, and either a 500gb SSD or a 1TB SSD, of going all-SSD (in some combination), and via some organization / software approach, not feel completely starved for space? One option would be 250GB+120GB+120GB+1TB = 1.5TB of pure SSD space. With a minus-movies/comics usage of 1.2tb, that would leave me with ~300gb of free space. With some better rules for how I keep games, I could stretch that further. Thoughts?

Thanks for reading as I try and logic through this. Looking forward to any ideas/advice/experience.

[caervek]

Well, for comparison my experience:

400GB Intel NVMe SSD
250GB Samsung 840 SATA3 SSD
480GB OCZ Bigfoot SATA2 SSD

Plus a 4TB Synology NAS (in another room next to the router)

The 400GB drive contains the Windows 10 O/S, personal folders, WoW/HotS/D3 and a steam library. The 250GB SSD contains a second Steam library. The 480GB drive contains a third Steam library plus a downloads folder. My distribution of Steam games depends on the age of the game and the amount of loading involved as older games are just happy to be on an SSD and will load instantly regardless of being on a 285MB/s SATA 2 SSD or a 2200MB/s NVMe SSD.

My music and video collections are all kept on the NAS and their folders added to the windows libraries, with gigabit ethernet the is no performance loss here. I also backup the system to a folder on the NAS occasionally using Windows backup.

I have no complaints the speed and silence is blissful, I gave up on SATA drives during WotLK and switched to a SSD/SAS mix then went full SSD a while back.

[Thunderball]

From your layout I suggest 250GB SSD for the OS+priority one games; 1TB SSD for other games; 3TB HDD for the media.

SSD suggestions below. Trion 150 and Corsair Force LE are the slowest here (and are using the same memory) others are relatively close. Benchmark is a good ol' 850 EVO at $340.

Storage: Sandisk Ultra II 960GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($234.00 @ B&H)
Storage: Corsair Force LE 960GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($239.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: OCZ TRION 150 960GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($224.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Mushkin Reactor 1TB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($249.15 @ Amazon)
Storage: Crucial MX200 1TB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($279.95 @ Adorama)

For the HDD your choice is basically WD Blue vs WD Green and I'm pretty sure you know the deal.

[Denpepe]

The only point I'm going to make is do not try to run games from a WD green drive, it may be better now then when I tried it, but I could not even get WoW to run decently on 2 2Tb WD green drives in raid 1, micro stuttering all the way, changed them to 2 1Tb blacks and all was good again.

The only reason I still use HDD's is because of the huge price difference vs capacity

atm I'm running 1 intel 240 GB SSD for OS and a couple games, 1 Samsung 240 GB 850 EVO for games, 1 OCZ 480 GB Trion 150 for more games and the 2 1tb WD blacks for older games and storage in raid 1.

The next time I do a big upgrade if SSD's are still as expensive I will probably go for 2 WD blacks 3Tb or up in raid 1 for storage as the current ones are starting to feel to small.

[Skroe]

I really appreciate the advice so far. Based on a synthesis of the above, I guess I should go with a 1TB SSD and skip the 500gb one no matter what?

Looking forward to more experience/advice to draw from

[I Push Buttons]

If you are looking to avoid re-downloading stuff then grab an external drive. Just keep the stuff you currently play on the SSDs and put everything else on the external drive until you want it.

Also you can get some decent 480GB SSDs for like sub $100 these days. If you wait a few months you can probably snag a bunch of them for like $80 or even less during Black Friday sales.

I say external and not just a plain old HDD because HDDs are loud, I do everything I can to avoid them now, even idle ones that I used to use for nothing other than storage because Windows/other processes just randomly spin them up all the time.

[Skroe]

So I was talking to my co-gm and how does this option look, drawing from the various experiences above:

-> I keep the 250GB SSD "C:" for Windows, WoW, and my favorite games.
-> I get a 1TB or 500gb SSD (maybe 2 if 500?) for most of my other games
-> I keep the 1TB Black for Work + Rarely played and old games (like my Quake SourcePorts and Origin games)

-> I move the 3TB Green to either a NAS or my other computer (TBD) and access those by sharing the folders over the network



I have an SSD question as well. If I go 1TB SSD or 500gb SSD, price will be an issue in this case. Is there much of a performance difference between say, an OCZ TRION and a Samsung 850, considering how I'll use it (games drive, not C:\) and consider I have a 250gb 850 evo as my core drive? I mean considering that the other two SSDs I have now are 4 year old (at least) 120gb OCZ Vertex 3s.

[I Push Buttons]

So I was talking to my co-gm and how does this option look, drawing from the various experiences above:

-> I keep the 250GB SSD "C:" for Windows, WoW, and my favorite games.
-> I get a 1TB or 500gb SSD (maybe 2 if 500?) for most of my other games
-> I keep the 1TB Black for Work + Rarely played and old games (like my Quake SourcePorts and Origin games)

-> I move the 3TB Green to either a NAS or my other computer (TBD) and access those by sharing the folders over the network



I have an SSD question as well. If I go 1TB SSD or 500gb SSD, price will be an issue in this case. Is there much of a performance difference between say, an OCZ TRION and a Samsung 850, considering how I'll use it (games drive, not C:\) and consider I have a 250gb 850 evo as my core drive? I mean considering that the other two SSDs I have now are 4 year old (at least) 120gb OCZ Vertex 3s.

Samsung SSDs are king right now, they are better than everything else performance wise, more reliable, etc. But that performance/reliability has a premium price tag.

[Argarock]

I went full ssd on my laptop (main gaming computer, yeah I know) a while ago, and its glorious, althou, I would have gotten a 2TB or more hdd if I had had the room for it, as atm I have to fool around with external drives for my movies / music.

If I were you, Id go with the 240 + 500 + 3000 option, you get plenty of games on 740 GB.

[Skroe]

Just kind of speculating here. When do people expect for 1TB SSDs to move down to the $100-$120 price range? After Christmas?

- - - Updated - - -

Samsung SSDs are king right now, they are better than everything else performance wise, more reliable, etc. But that performance/reliability has a premium price tag.

Yeah. I only build with Samsungs, and as I said, I have an 850 EVO in mine. I just was unclear as to the performance of the 850 evo compared to more baseline drives that won't be doing too much heavy lifting.

[Thunderball]

I have an SSD question as well. If I go 1TB SSD or 500gb SSD, price will be an issue in this case. Is there much of a performance difference between say, an OCZ TRION and a Samsung 850, considering how I'll use it (games drive, not C:\) and consider I have a 250gb 850 evo as my core drive? I mean considering that the other two SSDs I have now are 4 year old (at least) 120gb OCZ Vertex 3s.

There is a performance difference but it will depend on what type of game you're running. You might want to check this out.

[chazus]

Performance wise, you won't really notice much.

However having 4-5 drives would drive me personally, crazy.

If I had them money (which you might), I'd definitely get rid of the older SSD's. Pick a 1TB Samsung or Crucial drive, ditch everything else but the 3TB drive.

I feel, however, as someone who consistently struggles with both physical and logical hoarding, that you need to address the fact you have over 1TB in games. Games that you can redownload in a matter of minutes. Do you -really- play all of them? Are you just going to keep piling on more stuff? Half your problems and questions may be resolved simply by slimming down your actual downloaded library. That's just me, though. I can't stand having downloadable games just sit there when I haven't played in ages. If I want to finish something 'eventually'... I back up the saves and remove the game.

[I Push Buttons]

Yeah. I only build with Samsungs, and as I said, I have an 850 EVO in mine. I just was unclear as to the performance of the 850 evo compared to more baseline drives that won't be doing too much heavy lifting.

Samsung will write a lot faster than pretty much everything else, it will probably read faster more consistently, thought not by as significant a margin. And depending on the brand it is slightly to significantly more reliable. Against like OCZ, probably not that much more reliable, against off brands like PNY, probably significantly more reliable (comparatively).

The relative worth of those differences comes down to personal preference.

[Skroe]

Performance wise, you won't really notice much.

However having 4-5 drives would drive me personally, crazy.

If I had them money (which you might), I'd definitely get rid of the older SSD's. Pick a 1TB Samsung or Crucial drive, ditch everything else but the 3TB drive.

I feel, however, as someone who consistently struggles with both physical and logical hoarding, that you need to address the fact you have over 1TB in games. Games that you can redownload in a matter of minutes. Do you -really- play all of them? Are you just going to keep piling on more stuff? Half your problems and questions may be resolved simply by slimming down your actual downloaded library. That's just me, though. I can't stand having downloadable games just sit there when I haven't played in ages. If I want to finish something 'eventually'... I back up the saves and remove the game.

This was like half my question. Once it was really no big deal, but these 50gb games the last two years have really gotten it out of hand. I use Game Save manager, and back up to the cloud (Google Drive), so I keep all the save games. It is just having 5 drives is driving me nuts for the same reason.

Maybe I just need to not horde games.

As far as "hording stuff", not so much IRL besides my one vice, but on computers? Probably. One microcosm of the thought process if you look at my spacesniffer is comics. I collected Comic Books pretty hardcore starting about 2000 for a few years and accumulated tons of boxes of them. I eventually sold them off and built a much larger collection via torrent. I got 403gb of comic books... but that includes like, every X-Men comic from 1965-2016, of which I've read maybe 10% (the ones I grew up with + some 80s stuff). I caught myself storing 2015-2016 marvel, which I detest since it became SJW Comics, and disposed of them last week to free up space. Looking at the image, I could cut without cryiing about it, probably half the comics easily. Some of them would be a bitch to get ever again though (dead torrents), which is what holds me back. Redownloading the X-files (71gb) which I watch once maybe every three years or less (more this year because of the miniseries) is rather easier.

That'll all help, but I think it's pretty evident the big villian from an all-SSD approach, is stockpiling 30-50gb games, of which on that space sniffer I have installed
Doom - 54gb (I play this a lot)
Unreal TOurnament 2016 - 13gb
Unreal Tournament 3 - 10gb
Shadow of Mordor - 42GB
Rome TW II - 25gb
Batman Arkham Knight - 54gb
Wolfenstein TNO - 45gb
Alien Isolation - 30gb
COD Ghost (never played) - 30gb
Star wars: TFU2 - 28gb
Batman Arkham Origins - 27gb
Batman: Arkham City - 27gb
AvP 2010 - 27gb
Metal Gear Solid Revegence - 20gb
A CoD game - 18gb

I probably dont need to keep almost any of these install. Like Star Wars TFU2 - played it last winter. Won't play it again for some time.

Interestingly, the ones I really wanna keep are Doom 3, Quake 2, Quake 1, Unreal Tournament '99, etc, that I've tricked out with source ports and carefully modded (go check out Quake2XP on steam or Berserker). But those re all small.


I have decided one thing though. I'm not gonna get a 1TB SSD yet. I'm gonna go for a 500gb one. I've spent about $180 on computer stuff the past few days and I don't want to drop another $220 yet that will hopefully be $120 next year. I'm going with a $109 480gb OCZ Trion 150 from New Egg per the recommendations from above.

So the question is now

250gb SSD + 480gb SSD+ ?

Option #1 = Nothing, live off the land with 750gb for Games + Work. Move the 3TB / 1TB to the old computer or NAS. Two drives.
Option #2 = the 3TB HDD, a total of 3.750 TB. Keep the media drive local. Downsize game collection. Move the Black and SSDs elsewhere. Three drives.
Option #3 = the 1TB HDD, a total of 1.750TB. Keep a big games installed. Media on the NAS.
Option #4 = 1 or two 120GB Vertex 3s, for the "all SSD" solution. 3-4 drives, a total of 890GB-1TB of space. Not sure how I'd use the two SSDs. Maybe keep work stuff and document storage (my google drive) segregated physically on the one 120gb if I put one in, so a variant of Option #1

[chazus]

I, personally, would avoid OCZ. Going bankrupt and having the dregs bought off isn't exactly something I'd call customer confidence.

That said... I would probably do this.

Buy 500gb, transfer all SSD data to that one. Sell the old 3 SSD's to recoup some cost. Save up some more money and pick up another 500gb int he near future, and get rid of the 1TB (or keep it, whichever)

[Thunderball]

I, personally, would avoid OCZ. Going bankrupt and having the dregs bought off isn't exactly something I'd call customer confidence.

That said... I would probably do this.

Buy 500gb, transfer all SSD data to that one. Sell the old 3 SSD's to recoup some cost. Save up some more money and pick up another 500gb int he near future, and get rid of the 1TB (or keep it, whichever)

OCZ is now owned by Toshiba. All the newest products including this one is made with their components.

[Deleted]

Largest possible SSD for the things that matter like OS, apps and games. The media and such on HDD, external storage or whatever you prefer.

Samsung or Crucial all the way, solid performance, and great reliability history. Crucial is well known and reputable for their memory components, Samsung is one of the few making everything like firmware and controller in-house.

[Skroe]

So I took the advice of this thread to hart and combined it with my rewiring project!

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...9#post41508959

I settled on:

->250gb SSD (Samsung 850 Evo)
->500GB SSD (OCZ Trion 150)
-> 3TB HDD (WD Green).

I massively - and easily - cut down on Steam games given the advice in this thread. I have 85 free on my 250gb, 182gb free on my SSD and 320GB free on my 3TB HDD. All because I decided to stop doing stupid shit like having all 4 batman Arkham games installed at once.

The plan next year is to get a 1TB SSD when they hit about $120, or maybe at that point if 2TB is at $220 go for that. When that happens I'll move the WD Green to the other computer on the network.

Thanks for the help. Very happy with how it turned out.

- - - Updated - - -

Oh one more thing.

So I'm gonna move the 2x Vertex 3 120gb SSDs and the 1TB WD Black to my other computer (an i7 930 / X58 / 12gb memory / Geforce 560gt) that I use for work and media and storage.

I currently have my (don't laugh) 300gb WD Velociraptor 10,000 rpm HDD and a 500gb Seagate Barricuda with a 16mb cache.

Clearly that Barricuda is going to go, replaced by the 1TB Black. I'll throw both SSDs in there as well. But what about the Velociraptor. Really no point to keeping it anymore, eh? What to do with an old Hard drive?

[Thunderball]

I currently have my (don't laugh) 300gb WD Velociraptor 10,000 rpm HDD

Expensive as shit. Had 120GB one before SSD even were on the market.

[Skroe]

Expensive as shit. Had 120GB one before SSD even were on the market.

Yeah I went right from the 300gb Velociraptor (which was in my late 2010 first gen Core i7 930c) to the OCZ Vertex 3 like 18 months later?


I don't even know what possessed me to get that Velociraptor. I know it was the "hot gamer thing" back in 2010 but wasn't it like $250 for 300gb?