ssd or hard drive or both?

[Otaku-Kasai]

so im building my 1st gaming pc, im trying to spend about 750-800 on the tower, i want to know if i should get a large ssd, a large hard drive, or both?

[flibberdipper]

Both. OS and main programs should be on the SSD, and other stuff like games and all of your other crap should go on the HDD. Pretty nice setup once you decide what you want to do.

[Mo5]

240-ish GB SSD + 1TB HDD is the sweet spot

[minibois]

so im building my 1st gaming pc, im trying to spend about 750-800 on the tower, i want to know if i should get a large ssd, a large hard drive, or both?

both.

[Untouchable]

both.

[Lotus]

It really depends. Your budget might get in the way of going both, which unfortunately is the best result. The problem is than an SSD does nothing for ingame performance and so, in my opinion, is a luxury item. It doesn't actually do anything for you performance wise except decrease boot and load times. It sure feels snappier, but that's all you're getting with that $100 SSD.

As such in your price range I would probably put that money towards real performance parts that actually do affect ingame stuff. Until you have an i5-4460 CPU, h97 mobo, and an r9 290, I wouldnt get an SSD. Only after you have all those parts and there's money left in the budget would I try and shoehorn one into the build.

Another option is if you already have an HDD, use it as your mass storage drive and buy a 120GB SSD for $60 and save your money that way.

[Kyuubixchidori]

I went from 1tb drive, to a 256 gig ssd. I actually am not running out of room on it, have about 60 gigs free on it. I have my usual steam games, Just dont have music and movies. So you can get away with just a SSD if want, but you can get a 3tb drive for 100$, which is well worth it to throw all the mass data like large games, movies, and music on. 

 

I have a server set up, but dont really use it yet. I stream all my content currently

[kameshss]

256 or 240 GB SSD is best thing for storing OS, programs and games.

 

HDD for storage.

 

So yes Both

[cylpol1]

On a laptop can you game effectively with ssd only 

[Zweihander]

I had a mechanical drive, and a smaller SSD for my OS / few programs. Switched over to using a single SSD for everything, and I couldn't be happier. Right now I'm running a 512GB SSD (MX100), plan on getting a second at some point and running them in RAID 0. 

 

If you're at all like me, and hate noise -- ditch the mechanical drive.

[Captain_WD]

so im building my 1st gaming pc, im trying to spend about 750-800 on the tower, i want to know if i should get a large ssd, a large hard drive, or both?

 

 

Hey Otaku-Kasai,

 

It really depends on what you are planning for that build. If you need more space for heavier programs and games with longer loading times, go for a larger SSD. If you have a bigger media library and don't use many programs or games, go for a smaller SSD just for your OS and a couple of applications and a larger HDD for everything else. 

It also depends on if you care about noise, power, price, redundancy, possibility of data recovery in case of drive failure, etc.

If you give us more details, we could provide you with better advice and probably some suggestions like a specific drive for storage or gaming (WD Black, WD Blue, WD Green) or some combination for redundancy (WD Red).

 

Captain_WD