Looking for wise advice

[CrazyCactuaR]

Hi OcUK, I'm here to ask you professionals for advice regarding getting a new set of hard drives. The time has come to the ones I have are on their last legs and it's time to upgrade.

The motherboard I have is a Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe so if I remember correctly this only offer's two SATA 6GB and four SATA 3gb.

What I've managed to come up with so far from digging around the store is;

1x Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (WD2003FZEX) HDD

1x Crucial BX100 250GB SSD SATA 6Gbps 7mm Solid State Drive (CT250BX100SSD1)

The idea being I'll be using the WD as my storage drive for content that is not constantly used but provides the speed and size should I start playing music or streaming the video's I have through the network to TV or to the laptop.

The SSD was to store the o/s on as well as install my steam games on.

Ideally I would have wanted a second SSD for just the games but I'm unsure as to what the real difference would be if one of them would be on the SATA 3GB, Or due to the WD being for storage and streaming videos/music to my TV would it be perfectly fine to have that on a SATA 3GB and invest in two of the BX100's for utilizing both the SATA 6gb's.

I do apologise if I've ranted on to make no sense and I do thank you in advance to those who's able to guide me in the correct way.

I highly do appreciate if you know of anything better to choose from the OcUK Store If I've picked the wrong ones for what I'm needing.

 

[DragonQ]

A couple of points:

- The difference between SATA 3 Gbps and 6 Gbps for an HDD is essentially non-existant. You will never notice the difference.
- The difference between SATA 3 Gbps and 6 Gbps for an SSD is minimal outside of benchmarks. Yes, SATA 3 Gbps will theoretically bottleneck modern SSDs but they will still be blazingly fast compared to an HDD. You might lose the upper 5-10% of performance or something in real-world usage.
- You do not need a fast drive to stream media. Getting a WD Black for that is a waste. It may have faster loading times for games though, compared to a WD Green for example. Depends how many games you have - mine mostly fit on my SSD so I don't have to worry. The others go on my now-ancient 500 GB HDD and loading times are never an issue.

 

[CrazyCactuaR]

A couple of points:

- The difference between SATA 3 Gbps and 6 Gbps for an HDD is essentially non-existant. You will never notice the difference.
- The difference between SATA 3 Gbps and 6 Gbps for an SSD is minimal outside of benchmarks. Yes, SATA 3 Gbps will theoretically bottleneck modern SSDs but they will still be blazingly fast compared to an HDD. You might lose the upper 5-10% of performance or something in real-world usage.
- You do not need a fast drive to stream media. Getting a WD Black for that is a waste. It may have faster loading times for games though, compared to a WD Green for example. Depends how many games you have - mine mostly fit on my SSD so I don't have to worry. The others go on my now-ancient 500 GB HDD and loading times are never an issue.

Thank you DragonQ, So having two SSD's on the SATA 6GB's and perhaps swap the 2TB Black to a 4TB Green offering double the size for only £10 more?