Hard drive advice needed please

Soldato
Joined
2 Dec 2004
Posts
13,980
Location
Under The Desk, Wales
Guys, my daughter is running out of hard drive space on her PC. She only has about 15gb spare (256gb SSD).

She wants a spare drive in her PC as she wants to download some steam games.

Firstly, if i put a 1tb drive in, is it easy to direct the steam files to the new hard drive and then play them from that?

Second, if i decided to buy her a new 1tb SSD and use that for OS and games, how easy is it to clone the existing drive onto the new? I never done that before.

Also, what drive would you recommend these days?

Thanks
 
Pet Northerner
Don
Joined
29 Jul 2006
Posts
8,025
Location
Newcastle, UK
Samsung 870 QVO 1 TB

or

Crucial MX500 1 TB

which can both be had for around 80-90 if you can shop around

I have a couple of the crucials in my pc (I even went for a 2TB to replace the final HDD) and they're fine for the price. Not as fast an an nvme but they are cheaper and tbh once the games are on the drive (which your d/l rate might be slower than theoretical xfer rates), the reads are more than suitable IMO.
 
Pet Northerner
Don
Joined
29 Jul 2006
Posts
8,025
Location
Newcastle, UK
What if i put in an ordinary drive? Cost wise, its about half that if an SSD. Would the gaming performance be that noticeable?





short answer yes, it's noticeable, but if your daughter is like 10 or younger and doesn't know / care better - the money might be better spent on more space over speed.

Edit: another caveat might be the games she plays too, bigger games that rely on more assets in a bigger structure will take longer to load / may be subject to fps drops / pop-in from the assets being read from a plated drive as opposed to flash memory. However smaller, simpler games would not.
 
Soldato
Joined
6 Jun 2008
Posts
11,616
Location
Finland
I see. Would running a game from the HDD be such a big slow down? Very noticeable?
Depends also on rest of the PC.

Especially if memory is tight and game needs to load new assets often during gameplay HDD is going to cause lot more hiccups.
Again if there's enough memory, more assets can be kept in memory and they don't need to be read from mass storage as often.
And in case of more than enough memory Windows uses free memory as drive cache and last used files can be found from that.
 
Back
Top Bottom