As someone who kind of hid under a rock right when SSDs took off as a viable alternative...

As someone who kind of hid under a rock right when SSDs took off as a viable alternative, in terms of both capacity and cost, to HDDs, I'd like to get your guys' opinions on a couple of things.

Are the 1TB SSDs worth the price tag for someone just looking to use Steam, video recording/editing, a massive music library, etc? Are there any indications the price may start to drop decently by say, Q3/Q4 of 2016?

What software/media do you usually install on your main drive? What do you always install on your secondary/externals?

I've looked up some of this info, but it seems to be mixed, and a lot of it has "install everything on a secondary drive, install nothing on the main drive." The main drive being the SSD.

While I know 10 years ago, I would be angry with myself for asking something that's so easily googled, I feel like I'd like the harsher reality that Sup Forums usually replies with.

The berating, or lazy replies are expected, but I know someone might be kind enough to help answer my questions. Even if it is in a condescending manner.

Or maybe I'm so out of touch with Sup Forums, and that's not the norm anymore?

Anyways, thanks.

Get a 128gb ssd, install os and games on it. Store files on a secondary hdd.

>worth the price tag
What price tag? The $300-500 on a normal day?
The $199 sales?
The $99 super sales?
Last two, probably. Just use them for what you're working on, not your permanent storage.
That's where the 16TB ssd's come in/

>"install everything on a secondary drive, install nothing on the main drive."

It use to be that SSDs would wear out quickly, but this is not a problem anymore. SSDs will probably out live you. I'm currently running a single 250GB SSD in my desktop and it's perfectly fine. It's great not having the sound of a HDD spinning up and down constantly.

I can't believe this needs to be spelled out at least 5 times a day.
1. Look at your current disk usage. What do you want to put on the SSD? How much space is that going to take?
2. Based on this and your personal use habits, project how much space you are going to need in, say, 3 years. Do you download a 15-GB game every month? Do you delete some games? Do you often work with 200GB of video files at any one time? 20? Keep in mind that overestimating your needs is *way* preferable to underestimating your needs.
3. Check your wallet. Can it handle the price hit versus alternatives? Are the advantages of an SSD worth it? Often on sites like Amazon, drive benchmarks are included as images with reviews.

Literally that simple. But honestly, this should be common sense for anything you do in life.

Go with ultra cheap second hand 128 gb samsung 840 pro for OS
or with a cheap newer 850 250 gb evo again for us and basic software.

For storage it's a meme.

god almightly, no. with current game sizes that's not a viable option.
install OS, browser and smaller programs on the ssd
install games and store torrents on hdd

Unless you're playing online, you should notice a performance incease from using an ssd with any program that deals with large files, games included.

>what is ram for
>wanting 2 to 3 games max cause storage size
i mean, everyone has the right to be stupid

Currently have a 128gb ssd as my primary.
I suppose I could just go for a 512GB as my main, and not have to worry about ever really filling it.

Even USB 3.0 is something I'm barely using now, I was really in the stone age.

I think you guys answered my question, thank you.

I have a another question, and I'd rather not create another thread for it, as it's something I feel should be common knowledge now, but,,,

A secondary drive is also installed, which is a cheap 1TB 5400RPM HDD.

Let's say I install Skyrim on that secondary drive, and mod it extensively. With the exception of the load times becoming atrocious, would the modded game suffer with stability in any way? My GPU/VRAM/CPU/RAM are all extremely capable of running anything I throw at it.

Would installing games, and modding them heavily, to a weak secondary drive make it possibly unplayable?

Thanks, again, from a techno-illiterate fool.

Response too long. See

>Are the 1TB SSDs worth the price tag for someone just looking to use Steam
Yes

>Video recording/editing
I don't know

>A massive music library
Doesn't help much

>Are there any indications the price may start to drop decently by say, Q3/Q4 of 2016?
They've been dropping really fast for a few years. I got a 500 GB Samsung 850 EVO for $150 on Amazon during Black Friday or Cyber Monday or something.

SSDs are overall faster than hard drives (about double the speed), but the main thing they're better at is reading/writing a shitton of files. Hard drives typically have about a 4 or 5 ms latency inbetween different files, whereas the last time I checked an SSD's latency it was 0.05 ms I think.

Fuck off poorfag, everything loads faster with an ssd.

OP here. Thank you for that.

I really hate this stage of learning something new, because things become really obvious as they're slowly explained me.

Unfortunately, for me, it's the only way I seem to learn.

>I really hate this stage of learning something new, because things become really obvious as they're slowly explained me.
That's fair. There's a lot of research in this area (search, discovery, etc...) so begrudgingly I'll grant that figuring out the things you need to know about a new topic is literally like trying to learn how to learn.

Using an ssd totally is fine. I run a 1.2tb PCI-E ssd and it's fantastic (Intel 750)

Some people will say use ssd + HDD but honestly just get a big ssd. Speed increase is worth it, and they won't wear down with trim enabled for at least as long if not longer than HDDs.

All of the ssd dying or high fail rate or storage issue memes came from 1st gen ssds.

not the point, retard, I'm arguing that you shouldn't install games on a 128 GB SSD, unless you want to uninstall them all the time to make space for another one

How often do you buy games? I assume most people only switch games every year or so. I'm not a gaymer, so I dont know these things.

i have had a 250gb samsung 830 as my system drive for years and it still works perfectly.

i install all my programs and games on it. mass storage for movie files and such.

what does a 1tb cost, $200? it's well worth the price compared to a 7200 hdd

I have a 256 GB SSD and 2x2 TB HDD, as well as play vidya and have a massive music library. OS and games are installed on the SSD and everything else is stored on the HDDs. I think it's worked pretty decently for me, though I don't play a lot of AAA games nor keep a lot of games installed. I also don't record streams or anything but have plenty of space on my HDD if I decided to.

I played Witcher3 and DS3 this year so I'm already double your standard and its only end of May

>in terms of capacity and cost
But hard drives are still cheaper in that regard. What are you talking about?
Just get a 256-512GB SSD and a hard drive. Best of both worlds.

Cheapest SSDs currently are 20 cents per gb.

I'd still wait around a year so that you can buy high quality SSDs for that price.

It will mostly help with loading times.

Have 1TB ever actually been on sale for that price?

Also, what's a reliable 128GB or 256GB I can get on the used market?

Wouldn't be surprised.
And no idea, sorry. Look for a model that lasted one of those 3 year long write tests.

CrystalDiskInfo the writes to the SSD, n-word.

As someone who runs all SSDs with about ~1.5 terabytes of SSD storage I can say that it is worth it....for me. I have no clue what your occupation is or what you do, but getting an SSD is just better. You will notice the difference. Everything is more responsive, no IOP holdups, no stutters, web pages load faster, etc. If you want to drop 350$ or more on a 1tb SSD, that's your choice. Once you have an SSD tho, you will never go back.

1TB SSDs have the best price/GB ratio on the market right now. 500GB models are similar. Anything smaller or larger and you are wasting your money. Smaller drives also usually have worse performance.

I have 2x 256gb 850 pros in raid (just because) and it's all you need for even several large games. Besides, I use ramdisk so its just a frsh steam install with ported game files.

Now I want to torrent and Im looking at either getting a terabyte at around four hundred bucks or 950 pro at three hundred - torrents and 'peak' performance

Would you raid all ssds (850 pro for instance) to keep a monolithic performance or simplify using ahci.. I really like irst on a full intel board

I switched to using SSDs as my system drives a long while ago now. Silent operation and faster random seek times were enough to win me over. Improved performance further cemented me in.

Wouldn't dream of using HDDs for anything but mass NAS storage and backups now.

I have I have 6x240GB SSD, and a 480GB SSD.

1 240GB for PS4
1 240GB for brother's desktop
1 240GB for mom's laptop
1 240GB for my laptop
1 240GB for home server
1 240GB for my desktop boot drive
1 480GB for my desktop game/program storage

Then I have 3x4TB and a 5TB HDD for anime and movies