TR Forums

Is it better to keep my programs and storage on one HD and run my games with the other? If so which for which?

After you get used to how fast things start with an SSD, you'll view your HDDs as nothing more than bulk storage for your pornhome videos and family pictures. So I'd say get an SSD big enough to store both your programs (any particularly big ones?) and your games/Steam library. However, if you're building a new PC and are very budget limited, I would advice you to not cut into the CPU/GPU budget to fit a bigger SSD, as an SSD is very nice but will not improve in-game performance significantly for anything but the most broken games.

Well.....do you play alot of games? My Steam library is currently ~415GB and ever-growing. Obviously a 256GB SSD isn't going to cut it.

I personally think spending loads of cash for a large SSD just to store games is a waste. Hard drive speed typically doesn't matter much for games, because everything is loaded into RAM. The only difference you're going to see is in level load times, which is fairly trivial and doesn't affect the gaming experience (assuming you've got a halfway decent mechanical drive).

You'll probably end up acquiring more than one SSD over time.

Large games I don't play off an HD, but I do keep one around with smaller games or stuff I'm not playing right this moment on it.

Currently using a 256 and a 180, plan to add another 256 soon.

As to OS drive, I'm not convinced an SSD is considerably better than a HD+SSD cache drive like the ReadyCache or whatnot. You end up with a lot of files that aren't actively used just wasting space on it.

Not to say it isn't nice, I'm just not sure it's necessary.