How many spinning hard drives do you have in your desktop?

[ryan]

i love you katja will you marry me....6tb is more than justa number

[jaybee83]

11 hours ago, ryan said:

i love you katja will you marry me....6tb is more than justa number

im getting the popcorn ready: ryan vs. Katja's gf in the fight of their lives haha

[ryan]

lol...one too many..hopefully her gf isnt pissed...its a girl right im not a switch or anything,,,i was assuming female lol

[ryan]

I need more storage, I have a opinion question?

 

I can buy a 512gb SSD external 

or

Buy a 2tb External HDD at 7200rpm

 

should I go SSD is this it or do I get the extra 1.5 tb its just for slightly more games and my 3d movie collection

[Custom90gt]

12 hours ago, ryan said:

I need more storage, I have a opinion question?

 

I can buy a 512gb SSD external 

or

Buy a 2tb External HDD at 7200rpm

 

should I go SSD is this it or do I get the extra 1.5 tb its just for slightly more games and my 3d movie collection

 

That's a question only you can answer.  If you need more space and don't need it to be super quick than the HDD will be a fine option.  If you need less space but want it to be faster than get the SSD.  I you're thinking about trying to run games off of it, I'd get the SSD.

[ryan]

@Custom90gtRight now im leaning towards a HDD over  SSD but if I can get a 2tb SSHD I might go that route...do you know anything about SSHDs aka firecuda

[Custom90gt]

I've never had any experience with a SSHD first hand but the concept is simple. It will cache frequently used files (typically used for an OS drive) in the solid state portion so they are faster to load.  Not really of use for a storage drive unless you frequently access specific files.

[ryan]

yeah i thought it might help games caching the game. im not really storing movies/text just games. im thinking a normal hdd will be fine

[Custom90gt]

21 hours ago, ryan said:

yeah i thought it might help games caching the game. im not really storing movies/text just games. im thinking a normal hdd will be fine

 

If you're loading games (running them off of the external drive) then I would seriously consider a SSD.  If you're just backing up games or copying them to your laptop's SSD before playing them, the HDD will be fine.

[ryan]

yeah I had 14tb of HDD (external storage) at one point they were slow but good enough for VR movies/games. A SSD might help though with the change in my techno diet...im now at 4k with everything vs 1080p and i'm expecting 4k to put HDDS to sleep.

[Sandy Bridge]

It also depends somewhat on the game as to whether SSDs give a perceivable difference in load time.  Some games pack their data into a few large files, and if the game just loads up those files in whole, a hard drive will be at less of a disadvantage relative to an SSD than if it were loading a thousand small files.  The game also might be doing various CPU or GPU or memory limited tasks while loading.

 

The SSD will still be faster, but if loading from disk only takes 20% of the time when it's on a hard drive, by Amdahl's Law there is a maximum 20% decrease in load time no matter how fast of an SSD replaces the hard drive.  What that percentage figure is depends on the game and the other components of your system.

 

I've found that for many of the games I play, the difference isn't as large as I would have guessed (though there are a few where it's quite significant).  Generally the ones I play the most get prime billing on the SSD, all the rest go on the HDD unless they're glacially slow there.  In the end, if a game takes 45 seconds to load from the HDD versus 30 seconds from the SSD, it's a question of is it worth paying more for that faster load time?  What if it's 45 seconds vs 10 seconds?  Etc.

 

Disclaimer: I only have SATA SSDs, the difference may be more noticeable once I have an NVME drive.  Or not, since then I'll also have a Ryzen that decreases the CPU-limited part of game loading.

 

I would be curious if 4K films max out hard drives.  For 1080 Blu-Ray quality a hard drive is perfectly fine, and for playback there is no benefit to having them on an SSD.  In theory, as long as the bandwidth is below the sequential transfer speed of the hard drive, 4K/3D films should be 100% okay on a hard drive too, but I don't know what their bandwidth needs are.

[ryan]

yeah its a really tough call ill have to do a little research but I know for a fact it will be hampered with 8k movies...4k who knows.