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I'm buying a laptop soon ( us-store.acer.com/aspire-5-laptop-a515-51g-5488 ) and it has both a 1 TB HDD and a 128 GB SSD. I know that's an okay amount of storage, but I also know games tend to eat it up like crazy. I'd be using Steam, so I wouldn't download/install the entire game, but you know. And they wouldn't generally be massive games. L4D2, Garry's Mod. You know.
My father recommended putting the games on the SSD and everything else on the HDD, but I'm just looking for more opinions.

Steam allows you to put your games library on more than one drive. I'd suggest that you install Steam and your game library on the HDD, and selectively install only specific games that you wish onto the SSD (you can change the targeted drive when installing games within Steam).

128 GB is quite small for an SSD, so given a choice, I'd not put any games on it at all, but leave it for just the OS + applications. Bear in mind that SSDs are happier with more unused space, as that allows their various algorithms (wear levelling, TRIM, etc.) to function better.

Games also tend to do a lot of sequential access (e.g. loading textures & level data at the start of a game), so the benefit of an SSD will not be as pronounced as an application that does a lot of random accesses.

I usually keep any game I'm intending to play on an SSD (you will usually notice the difference) and everything else on an HD, lately.

Windows install can go on either without making that much difference but OS patching and boots will irritate you on an HD.

OS on the SSD for sure, and move games to the SSD if you find load times to be obnoxious. Steam has a built-in method to move games around between drives now.

Yeah, it's kinda hit or miss. I keep some games on the SSD, but not everything. The install times are what's really cut down for me (even with Steam). Just put what you play regularly on there and move things off when you don't. Not gonna hurt anything in the long run.

Same answer as above. If you're only working with 128GB SSD then you'll want to move your user files (My Documents/Pictures/Videos/etc) to the hdd (you can re-target the windows explorer shortcuts to point to the hdd also so it's seamless). Then it comes down to the games you play. A couple modern 40GB game installs and your SSD will be full, so you'll have to choose carefully. Probably best to just put the games on your hdd as a default.

To add to what everyone else is saying, 128GB is really small for an SSD. If you can in any way swing a larger one, you'll be much happier in the long run.

So if I were to go with a laptop with a 256 GB SSD vs a 128 GB SSD, is that a significant difference or just a little better?

crowguts wrote:

So if I were to go with a laptop with a 256 GB SSD vs a 128 GB SSD, is that a significant difference or just a little better?

Figure half of that 128 is for Windows, so you're left with 64 GB of fast storage. Yet, you don't want to run it full, so you have closer to 50 GB or so. Some games won't even fit on that. :/

So yeah, 256 is a big bump.

CScottG wrote:

https://www.elitebytes.com/MaxVeloSSD.aspx

Is that a program that uses RAM as a disk cache? I thought modern OSes did a good job of that automatically.

crowguts wrote:

So if I were to go with a laptop with a 256 GB SSD vs a 128 GB SSD, is that a significant difference or just a little better?

Yes, big difference. Its a change from "adequate" to "usable/comfortable".

For example: I have a 256 GB SSD + 4 TB HDD in my desktop. The SSD has Windows, applications, user profile, personal files & photos, and my frequent Steam games like Age of Empires 3, Age of Mythology, Call of Duty 2, Rise of Nations, and yet the SSD has 90+ GB free space. My Steam folder is ~13 GB.

So if the upgrade is open to you - take it. With 128 GB you will either hit the upper limit quickly, or you'll be playing a game of "Do I put this on the SSD or HDD?" quite often.

Yan wrote:

CScottG wrote:

https://www.elitebytes.com/MaxVeloSSD.aspx

Is that a program that uses RAM as a disk cache? I thought modern OSes did a good job of that automatically.

Modern operating systems do. The only ones that provide a real improvement are also unsafe (for writes) in the case of crashes, so they're not useful for much.

EDIT: That product in particular uses your SSD as a persistent cache. It could be okay, but it totally depends on the caching algorithm and how well they've honed it.

Waco wrote:

EDIT: That product in particular uses your SSD as a persistent cache. It could be okay, but it totally depends on the caching algorithm and how well they've honed it.

I'm curious. I'll try it and see.

That site is a good example of why nobody should ever use Google Translate to create a Web page.

Yan wrote:

Waco wrote:

EDIT: That product in particular uses your SSD as a persistent cache. It could be okay, but it totally depends on the caching algorithm and how well they've honed it.

I'm curious. I'll try it and see.

That site is a good example of why nobody should ever use Google Translate to create a Web page.

Hopefully it's not malware.

They've been around for a "long" time (I remember seeing the site in 2013).. but someone certainly could have hacked and replaced the file.

I've not used it myself. It is however a block-level cache (like Primo) - so it does do something different than the OS. My guess is that you only need to allocate half a gig. of system RAM to get good benefit from the program, particularly with respect to small writes.

IF it's like most-such programs though, it probably takes the entire SSD for 2nd level cache.. and IF that's the case then you could be screwed if they put the OS on the SSD (..which I think would be likely). As always, backup the system before going through with it.

My biggest worry is the OS updates killing it (or the OS) - but in a search I didn't come-up with a gob of complaints in that respect (..though my google-foo could be busted).

I don't think it works on my system. It keeps telling me that I have to run it under Windows 7 or later (I am), and I can't see any sign that it's running as a program or as a service, or that it's using space on my SSD.

I'm also not interested enough to spend a lot of time figuring it out.

The website and documentation is pretty awful, but:

https://www.elitebytes.com/OnlineManualStart.aspx

..and specifically installation:

https://www.elitebytes.com/OMVS_c07.aspx

CScottG wrote:

My guess is that you only need to allocate half a gig. of system RAM to get good benefit from the program, particularly with respect to small writes.

Anything that uses system RAM for write caching is a bad idea.

EDIT: To be clear, they absolutely do work if your goal is outright speed, but they're incredibly likely to hose your filesystem if your machine crashes before the buffers are flushed. Because they lie about writing safely, any properly written application that explicitly flushes data will be mislead. The results are never good.

How tech savvy are you? I'd get the 128GB laptop, then buy and install my own 500GB SSD. Installing windows 10 on a new OS drive for a computer that already had Win10 activated is pretty straightforward and free. I've got quite a few large games installed on my 500GB SSD with room to spare.

If not, yes, 240-256GB is more manageable. The higher capacity will also be faster. Don't buy the 128GB laptop and install your own 256GB SSD though. Best you'd manage with that is a break-even cost with the slight inconvenience of having to install windows yourself on the new drive. Of course, that also means you get to wipe off all the bloatware that the laptop manufacturer piled in, so a worthwhile inconvenience.

ALSO i noticed your link to the Acer store. Are you going to pay $650 for that machine? Not sure if you think you want/need the 1TB hdd, but newegg has this model for $630 with a 256GB SSD, a MX150 GPU, and a 1080p screen. Given those two options, I'd definitely choose the latter.
Going by Acer's site for the A515-51G series it looks like there might be an empty 2.5" slot in the laptop linked above that you could install your own hdd into. That's just a quick google search, do your own research to confirm. Looks like 1TB hdds run about $50. Pay attention to the height limitation in the laptop, 2.5" hdds come in 7mm, 9.5mm and 15mm thicknesses.

I would absolutely recommend against a 128gb ssd if your budget can afford a larger one. Not only will you be playing "space Tetris" trying to fit things on it (after the OS and a fwe programs), but 128gb models are the slowest of any current SSD line. Personally I'd skip the 1tb drive and buy the largest SSD you can afford. Then if you need more space, buy an external SSD USB 3.0/3.1 drive. Between the two of those you'll have a 500gb-1tb of SSD storage, and it should last you for years. Plus with the open space that the 1TB drive was going to occupy, you can buy an internal SSD and stick that in there. SATA ssd's are cheap now and getting cheaper as NVME takes over. No one should be buying HDD's unless they're like 4gb or more these days IIMO.

pfft I don't even need my 2TB HDs most of the time. The only reason I'd still buy a 2TB over a 1TB is the price difference is $5.

Games will get a huge boost to loading times if they're on an SSD, but 128GB is barely enough for Windows. If you can spare a couple hundred bucks I strongly suggest upgrading to a 512GB SSD, commodity grade is fine. Do it up front, since you need to do a fresh Windows install anyway in order to be free of all the worthless **** crapware that OEMs love to bundle.

I use SSD for OS and some games I am playing and 128 GB is enough for me. Though I have around 3TB's of old HDD's so yeah.

I've been moving games from SSD to mechanical with Steam Mover (just a convenient one-button GUI for creating symlinks) long before libraries were a thing with Steam, and MOST games don't even care that much about the speed of an SSD - they tend to open huge map or texture files and most of the loading time is CPU work to decompress the files into RAM. SSD's at 500MB/s are better than mechanical drives at 200MB/s for these large sequential files, but in the grand scheme of things it's only going to save 2-3 seconds off a 15 second loading screen.

There are some edge-case examples where the game requires a lot of I/O and then an SSD can really help. My advice would be to run everything off mechanical and move things to an SSD if the load times are bad, just to see if it makes a worthwhile difference.

I have only Guild Wars 2 installed on my 0.5 TB SSD. All other games are on a 7200 rpm hard drive. With just 0.12 TB, you don’t have enough room for any games on your SSD.