Can I store games on my HDD, but run on my SSD?

[viperatedrko]

I'm going to join the PC gaming community soon coming from a lifetime console gamer, but I wanna know how booting and storing on different drives works.

I'll be using an 240GB Intel 335 SSD for Windows OS & boot and a 250GB HDD for storage.

I know that using an SSD for games can decrease load times, therefore I want to run games on them. However, I do not want to store them on my SSD despite having a reasonable capacity.

Is it possible to have a game stored in an HDD, but use the SSD to load it?

(Forgive me if I sound stupid, I'm a noob at PC building)

[TheGamingBarrel]

No, sadly.

[Coombzy]

No the game will run on the drive it's on.

[dizmo]

Narp. It runs from the drive it's installed on.

Consider buying a larger SSD if the money's there?
Also 250gb HDD isn't worth the money.

[KamiKatze]

No, it doesn't work this way. The SSD or HDD just store the game. When it's launched, all relevant data is loaded to your much quicker RAM. The only difference between SSD and HDD is the time it takes to put the data into your RAM, with SSDs being faster and HDDs being slower. So effectiveley the only thing you can influence by that is loading times but not the overall gaming performance.

[Dude]

No, unless you (inexplicably) place the .exes on the SSD (and maybe a few other files) but even that wouldn't and shouldn't work.

[thekeemo]

if you can get an SSHD

[dizmo]

if you can get an SSHD

Noooo. They're very, very rarely worth the money.

[Johannes_Lazor]

Some SSHD's does what you want But you have to pay a premium for it.

Some games wont need to load much after it have started so they fit pretty good in a HDD but games like Skyrim and other games that need to load much in game fit better in a ssd.

[thekeemo]

Noooo. They're very, very rarely worth the money.

it depends on how much it matters to him

[dizmo]

it depends on how much it matters to him

You can, most times, spend another $10 - $15 and purchase a 128gb SSD with a 1tb HDD.

Which absolutely destroys the 8gb cache you get with an SSHD.

[Pulunen]

Something like 1 TB Western Digital Black Drive would be well enough for running games. Personally I have a 500GB 840 EVO.

[xc3ll]

Well... You can't run games from your hdd on your ssd. But: You can use some space on your SSD as a "cache" for your harddrive or buy another SSD just for caching. It's a lot faster than SSHD's, since you can use much larger cache-sizes. And it will speed up your loading times. The only question is: Is it worth it? Well, to be honest, I never tried.

 

To boot from an SSD you need to have your OS installed on the SSD. And this makes a hell of a difference.

 

From my (limited) experience with consoles i can say, that even a old HDD will load games significantly faster than a console. Just sayin'....

[graverobber22]

If your rig is only running 500g's of memory than get another ssd and run them in raid 0 and then just back them up to a hard drive.

[LogicalDrm]

Bit off topic here but you really should consider getting 1tb HDD. They cost around $€50.