Thread: Looking for Opinions on Hard Drive Setup

That's fine Soy. For ME though... I can't yet justify over 1 dollar per gig (over 3 dollars per gig at the high end) for a hard drive that sure, is faster. I'm patient enough to wait the extra few seconds it takes to load off of a raid array. Some may not be. The price, combined with the low sizes just flat out turn me off. Especially when I can't see THAT much increase in speed over my work machine which only has an SSD in it.

So basically... Mileage May Vary.

Originally Posted by Kanati8869

That's fine Soy. For ME though... I can't yet justify over 1 dollar per gig (over 3 dollars per gig at the high end) for a hard drive that sure, is faster. I'm patient enough to wait the extra few seconds it takes to load off of a raid array. Some may not be. The price, combined with the low sizes just flat out turn me off. Especially when I can't see THAT much increase in speed over my work machine which only has an SSD in it.

So basically... Mileage May Vary.

I agree on cost, and on that note HDD's are plenty fast enough still. Nothing is so big (yet) that it significantly impedes anything. SSD's are definitely a luxury ... one I do enjoy!

Although the recent jump in HDD prices is part of why I went SSD on all my media centers. I was preparing to get a new round of HDD's before the price jump. After that I decided on small SSD's and a central storage on HDD.

SSD prices have come down a lot. I paid $470 for 160GB just two years ago. I bought an 80GB SSD in December for $80 after rebates. Hard disk prices have been high lately because of the floods in Thailand so it is a bad time to buy a hard disk. Hard disks still blow away SSDs in cost per gigabyte but that really only becomes a factor if you are storing a lot of data. My strategy now is a small SSD for the OS/applications and NAS (using hard disks) for data.

As I said before, I need to keep the cost below 200. Apparently Newegg has some 120/128GB SSDs for the 150-200 dollar range. I cleaned up my system to approximate what I would have on a new drive, and it's at about 108GB, so a single SSD would in fact handle everything I need. I can probably reformat the hard drive I have now and store things that aren't games, or low-priority games.

I'll look into this more a bit later.

An SSD will likely be the most noticeable upgrade you can get for under $200. Yes, even more than a new graphics card. The load times in BF3 are dependent on the amount of memory you have and your hard drive. When I moved BF3 to my SSD, I noticed about 15-20 second difference compared to my RAID-0 WD Black drives. That is pretty good considering I always thought my Black drives handled loads extremely fast.

Always keep a hard drive for bulk storage and use the SSD for your OS and more frequently used applications/games.