Big SSD or small one…(gaming)

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I see some builds with a small SSD (250) which I assume takes the OS and a larger SATA HDD

I have plenty of cloud and NAS storage so would only need game related stuff.
What would be most cost efficient combo or size.

Any advice?
 
Is 250 enough or 500 SSD?
I would get the largest you can afford especially if your gaming as modern games can use a lot of storage.

You could also particion a larger drive into 2 smaller drives with windiws and programmes on one and games on another so if you have to reinstall Windows your games are still on the other particion.
 
250 is usually poor value (high premium, because it needs all the same stuff as larger drives, but less capacity). 500 is reasonable, 1TB or 2TB is best value.

e.g. 250 £35, 500 £45, 1TB £70
 
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My PC just has a single storage device, a 2TB SSD. I had planned to get just 1TB but the 2TB was on offer for a relatively small premium over the 1TB.
Don't forget that storage size is the literal number of bytes, so a 1TB drive has around 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. But in PC storage terms 1KB is 1024 bytes, 1MB is 1024 KB etc.
A 1TB will be seen as having around 900GB capacity, a 500GB drive will have around 450GB capacity and the 250GB around 225GB capacity.
Like the OP I don't store much on my PC, which in my case is because I have a separate server. With my Win 10 OS, a typical number of apps (MS Office, a video editing tool and a smattering of utilities) and a game (currently Wolfenstein 2) my used space is 234GB, so clearly I'd have a problem with a 250GB drive!
Games are getting bigger so it wouldn't be too long before a 500GB drive will be too small - I would advise getting 1TB.
 
It used to be more cost effective to get 1 small drive and then a bigger one for games example a 250gb and 500gb, now 1TB Nvme are cheap enough go for 1TB min or a 2TB if you can stretch to it.

I've got a 1TB and with Windows and games I'm hovering around 600GB used.
 
Ta. Wasn’t sure how big games were these days

Last I looked, Ark Survival Evolved was eating 150gb. It was the reason I had to get a 1tb ssd in addition to my 500gb boot ssd.

Even my XCOM 2 folder is something like 35gb, and that's now an old game. World of Warcraft is about 50.

Don't underestimate the storage needed to play half a dozen games, they have gotten very bloated! :eek:
 
Last I looked, Ark Survival Evolved was eating 150gb. It was the reason I had to get a 1tb ssd in addition to my 500gb boot ssd.

Even my XCOM 2 folder is something like 35gb, and that's now an old game. World of Warcraft is about 50.

Don't underestimate the storage needed to play half a dozen games, they have gotten very bloated! :eek:
ARK is ridiculous, I think last time I checked it my install folder was about 385GB (including all DLC maps and 20+ GB of mods) :D

I'll check later and see how big it has gotten now - the two main issues are that it doesn't clean up after itself very well when it updates and also seems to have a duplicate copy of all the game assets for some unknown reason (seekfreecontent).
Basically, Wildcard just didn't care and never bothered to optimise it
 
Wildcard just didn't care and never bothered to optimise it

Does the AI still take no fall damage because they couldn't be bothered writing a pathfinding algorithm to stop dinos jumping off cliffs? They never struck me as a developer who had any intention to polish or even finish their game, just turning out 'expansions' on a barely functional beta product :cry: But yeah, it is an example of how bloated some games can get. Personally I don't think assuming 30-50gb per game would be far wrong on average.
 
@eddiew tbh if dinos you weren't riding took fall damage the game would be even more infuriating!

Just checked and it's 255GB with only Crystal Isles, Lost Island, Scorched Earth (+ The Island) installed :p ........ Crystal Isles is 47GB on it's own! (P.s. if you're looking for someone to play with some time let me know! Currently toying about with Pugnacia on Crystal Isles but can throw up a server for whatever mod!)

But yeah, overall, I'd want as much fast storage as I can for games these days, or an even larger disk to cold store games so I don't have to download them again (using SteamTool!)

Currently have a 1TB nvme split in to 200GB C drive and the rest games, plus 750GB of other SSD storage......Plus 1TB mech drive for recording.
I have a 1TB sata SSD waiting to go in (and will probably remove the 500 and 250GB drives in there currently), but ideally would like at least another 2TB for games!
 
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@eddiew tbh if dinos you weren't riding took fall damage the game would be even more infuriating!

Just checked and it's 255GB with only Crystal Isles, Lost Island, Scorched Earth (+ The Island) installed :p ........ Crystal Isles is 47GB on it's own! (P.s. if you're looking for someone to play with some time let me know! Currently toying about with Pugnacia on Crystal Isles but can throw up a server for whatever mod!)

Ahh, thank you but it's been a while since I played. May be tempted back some time though :)

And no, there's never enough storage is there? I have a 500gb "boot" m.2 ssd, split into 2 with Windows and a partition of "smaller" games like Eastshade (2gb) and Cities Skylines (21gb). Then there's a 500gb sata ssd that for some reason only has Civilization V and a bunch of photos and drawings. Then there's a 1tb m.2 ssd that is full of my actual working set of drawings, World of Warcraft (99gb!), various Minecrafts (~30gb), XCOM 2 (70gb), Subnautica (12gb)... etc.

Back to my point that games got bigger than many people realise :D

Oh, then there's the 4tb spinning drive for media, plus another 4tb usb drive for manual backups every couple of months. Just dump out my important documents, drawings and save files then tuck it back into a drawer.

Next time I am looking at storage, I will probably replace and consolidate the 2x 500gbs into a single 2gb+ m.2 drive. If 4gb satas ever get genuinely cheap I may swap out that last mechanical drive and take all moving parts out of my storage... It's so jarring when I access it and there's this big pause and soft whirr as it actually wakes up from sleep :cry:
 
its this simple now days, minimum 1tb SSD or 2tb if you can... if not
250gb SSD for O/S and app's then a 2tb HDD for games.


i have 2 x 2tb SSd's but i still dump games on a 4tb HDD and i get no lag or loading problems
 
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