Matheiu says: So I guess what was said was kind of right. I missed where he said this. So if 40 is minimum, then this is also correct.

Might I be able to re use this hard drive?:

Maxtor 6L250S0 (250GB, SATA150, 16MB Cache) : 233GB (C:)

Yes if that's enough space for you, but you're still left with additional costs and issues. You'll need the separate GPU, Windows (or whatever OS you are planning to use), and probably a new power supply as the one that comes with it probably wouldn't be sufficient after you're done adding GPUs and HDDs. Even after all that, you still have no way of getting USB 3.0 without replacing the mobo, which is kind of a big deal on a brand new PC imo.

For roughly the same cost, they could have used a 750gb HDD @ 7200rpm instead of the puny little SSD. That would have been far more practical.

As in, you need that much space left in the drive or they actually get that big?

ArmA 2 CO is 12 gigs, but I just assumed it was a special case being that the maps are hundreds of kilometers square. Only disadvantage of SSDs I've read about have to do with the speed it writes things. Never heard of them wearing out faster for doing so.

There is a physical limit on the number of times data can be erased and rewritten on an SSD before it dies.

Well I would assume the same would apply to everything. Everything has a lifetime of course.

Would you happen to know it's estimated lifetime?

Both. I currently have Alpha Protocol and Chronicles of Riddick installed, both need around 11 GB on the disk. I also have plenty of games that need just below 10 GB: Alan Wake, FIFA Manager 10, Fallout 3 ... and so on. And, again: Space requirements will raise considerably during the next few years. They actually have risen quite _slowly_ during the past 5 years because the longevity of the current console generation (and their limitations) is holding developers back.


SSD sectors die after a limited amount of rewrites. This was one of the biggest drawbacks of this technology when it was introduced. It's possible that technology has improved by now, I'm not entirely up to date with SSD specs. 1-2 years ago, the standing recommendation was to not use SSDs in environments where data needs to be shifted around a lot.

It varies by manufacturer and model (as with most things in life, you get what you pay for). There is a data management thing called TRIM that I've read can extend the lifetime by a considerable amount.

I knew it was a good idea to add a second 750GB HDD to my PC. Some games are indeed quite huge.

I stay away from SSD drives for now, I just don't like the idea of having such a miniature storage drive as the primary drive. I guess I can still wait some time for Windows to boot up. Here's hoping for some new storage technology which would be both very fast and big, at the same time.

On netbooks and such (mobile devices) I understand SSDs better, less fragile, less heat, less power consumption etc. (I presume).

Hmm, come to think of it, I'm unsure what kind of storage drive ASUS Transformer has (certainly not HDD, that's for sure :)), but it takes longer for it to boot to Android desktop, than my Win7 PC to boot to its desktop (without SSD). I'm talking about actually booting it up, not just waking it up from sleep mode.

EDIT: Oh, and I didn't know about the (reduced?) lifetime of SSD either... I do recall reading that e.g. defrag programs should not be run on SSD drives.

Wikipedia says: So yeah. SSDs last about as much as normal HDDs.

Even saying they last half as long, let's say I uninstall and reinstall a few games about every other month. That's still not bad.

The good part about a small SSD, it's fast and you don't install a lot of unnecessary games at the same time.

However, I would buy a faster GPU. That one is not going to run ARMA 2 well. I would go for at least a 150-200$ card like a GTX560Ti.

I read up a bit and it seems that you're correct. That particular piece of information seems to have been outdated, sorry for that. Apparently SSDs have managed to mitigate that problem (which was an issue a few years ago) to a state where the longevity of SSDs isn't worse than that of HDs anymore.

That still doesn't change the other things I mentioned, but yes, the part about SSDs having a shorter lifecycle should be disregarded.

As far as I'm aware, this only applies to the higher end ones, the cheap ones still don't generally last longer than a year or so. Also on a budget machine, it makes no sense to use SSD regardless of it's shelf life. The cost vs amount of memory difference is massive, and a fast (7200rpm) HDD is not much slower than an SSD, yet you can get several times the amount of storage for the same price.

Wut?

That's true, though most of that will be seen at boot up. For gaming, you won't see much speed increase, except a few seconds for loading times (depending on how long loading times are to begin with). Since games are designed for mechanical hard drives speed will rely more on processor, GPU and RAM. Everything run from the hard drive is generally preloaded into memory before it becomes a bottleneck...

I currently have 4 games 20GB or larger on my hard drive, without saves or mods, just game data: SWTOR is 20GB, Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate is 27GB, Shogun 2 is 26GB, and Witcher 2 is 22GB. I have plenty more that are 10-20GB, including Fallout New Vegas (nearly 20GB with mods now, actually) and Neverwinter Nights 2 (a seven year old game). It's gotten to the point where I'm actually very surprised if a game is under 10GB anymore, and it really won't be long before that is 20GB. I mean, 2 DVDs can easily carry 20-30GB uncompressed, so even without blu-ray or faster internet speeds having games that big is not really a problem.