SSHD - Anyone using as a primary?

rich998a · 25 Oct 2014 at 19:25

I've been looking at upgrading my 500Gb hard drive on my PC. I'm starting to run out of space on it with all the games. Steam is having too many weekend specials at the moment.

I'm taken by the SSD options, but the cost of cloning over to an SSD 512GB drive is going to set me back £300.

Given that, the SSHD option may be the way to go, opting for a 1Tb or higher. Is anyone using one of these? I just want to know how they are find it on Win8 start-up and shutdown, and if they have noticed much of a difference?

Would I be better going for a smaller SSD with the OS on it, and then linking either a HD or SSHD to that?

snips86x · 25 Oct 2014 at 19:34

What SSDs are you looking at? I would recommend a 512gb as they're cheap and would do just the job. A 1TB SSD would be closer to £300:

YOUR BASKET
1 x Samsung 500GB SSD 840 EVO SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7TE500BW) £184.99
1 x Crucial M500 480GB SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Hard Drive - (CT480M500SSD1) £174.98
1 x SanDisk Ultra II 480GB 2.5 Inch SATA 6Gbps Solid State Drive (SDSSDHII-480G-G25) £164.99
1 x Crucial MX100 512GB SATA 2.5” 7mm SSD + 9.5mm Adapter CT512MX100SSD1) £154.99
Total : £689.56 (includes shipping : £8.00).

rich998a · 25 Oct 2014 at 19:54

The MX100 512Gb was the one Custom PC recommended, so I was indeed considering that.

Would it make sense to clone the existing hard drive onto this MX100, and then have a mass storage secondary - either HDD or SSHD?

wazza300 · 25 Oct 2014 at 20:25

what board are you using? you can also go down the caching route by using upto 60gb ssd and a large 2 or 3tb hdd

im using caching on one of my pc's and it works verywell,kinda like a larger version of a sshd

littlepuppy · 25 Oct 2014 at 20:25

i would go 2tb sshd as secondary for steam etc, then just get the ssd of your chooce for os.

rich998a · 25 Oct 2014 at 20:57

I've got a Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4 with an A10-5800k Black Edition processor. I'm about to go from a single R9 270x to a dual Crossfire setup, so need to upgrade the PSU anyway as there are not enough PCI-e leads on the 550w I'm using. Just looking at the storage issue at the same time to see if it worth doing this at the same time.

You've both said a similar thing in using an SSD as the primary for the OS, and a larger drive (SSHD) for main storage.

-How big an SSD drive is required for Windows 8.1?
-Will Windows allow me to use an existing licence number on a new drive if I set it up fresh?

cwgk91 · 26 Oct 2014 at 00:48

I used to use an SSHD as my primary drive and it was great - booted into windows with the same speed as an ssd. But that was it. The ssd part is only 8gb so basically only has enough space to 'learn' windows.

As above, Id recommend around a 512gb SSD for putting windows and multiplayer games on (ones which require a fast loading time) and then a large mechanical drive for your games which require less speed. A little bit more expensive, but the performance boost is worth it.

If you just want windows on the ssd then you only need a tiny one - 64gb would do it easily with one game.