Will I be able to put games on this ssd and it still run fast

[Joltzz]

The ssd is an Intell 660p 512gb

[SkilledRebuilds]

Just now, Joltzz said:

The ssd is an Intell 660p 512gb

Yes.

 

Depending on the MAKER..
Sometimes...the drive will slow down a little when past 50% Remaining, and again when 25% Remaining.
Other than that.... not a whole lot....

Even when it does,.. you'd hardly notice it unless you were already waiting a long time, most games on a SLOW SSD, still faster than HDD due to file access times being so quick on smaller files as well as bigger files,.. something a HDD still suffers with... small files.

[Enderman]

There is no reason why it would not run fast if you put games on it.

Who told you that??

[Rosss]

Like SkilledRebuilds said, it only slows down when you run it under continuous load for a little while. Games won't do that, so you'll be fine unless you are transferring files off it at the same time. I have the 660p in this laptop but i'm not a hardcore gamer :P.

 

Anyways, Linus actually made a video on it that explains it all:

 

 

 

 

 

[Joltzz]

Yeah I watched it that’s why I asked

[emosun]

the amount of information stored on a drive has no relation to its speed

[SkilledRebuilds]

31 minutes ago, emosun said:

the amount of information stored on a drive has no relation to its speed

100% Wrong, don't make blanket statements.

Some, Not ALL,.. SSDs DO slowdown surpassing 50% and 25% Remaining Free space.

This is available information online from many manufacturers of SSDs.

[emosun]

1 minute ago, SkilledRebuilds said:

100% Wrong, don't make blanket statements.

 

the irony is outstanding 

[SkilledRebuilds]

2 minutes ago, emosun said:

the irony is outstanding 

Funny, I don't see the Irony...
My statement isn't false,...

27 minutes ago, emosun said:

the amount of information stored on a drive has no relation to its speed

 

Yours was.

[emosun]

2 minutes ago, SkilledRebuilds said:

I know,.. life is like that.

gee thx grandpa

[SkilledRebuilds]

2 minutes ago, emosun said:

gee thx grandpa

Your welcome, young upstart..
You can google My statement quite easily and see factual evidence for it happening.
Can you.... for your input? We are here to help others,.

[Rosss]

guys guys, i'm sure our arguing doesn't equate to anything substantial regarding the answering of the OP.. It can make us all closer and grow if we all resolve our differences though, so let's try to do that

 

1 hour ago, Joltzz said:

Yeah I watched it that’s why I asked

 

Rewatch 8:10 if you're wondering about game load times, but since your I think your question was about filling it with games and it still working the same as it did when it wasn't filled, I'll say this:

 

Like he said in the video, it's not recommended to fill your SSDs to the brink; Putting 400gb of games on it will be fine and it'll still be wicked fast!

[Spotty]

8 hours ago, emosun said:

the amount of information stored on a drive has no relation to its speed

It does matter, for both HDD and SSD actually. Especially for the drive the OP has.

 

For HDD they will typically write data to the inner edge of platters first where it can access data most quickly. Back before SSDs people used to reduce the volume size so the disk only used the inner most part for storage. This is known as "short stroking", and has largely fallen out of favour since SSDs came to the market.

If you have a full drive, or one that is fragmented, it can cause some performance loss as the seek head has to travel further across the drive platter to locate the data, and in the case of fragmentation may need to access multiple areas across the disk to access one file.

 

As for SSDs, the way they move, edit, and delete data requires free space on the drive. A block of data is made up of pages of smaller chunks (pages) of data. If you want to delete any information from that block, the entire block needs to be deleted. To change one page, the rest of the pages that aren't being deleted must be first transferred to a new empty block and then the old block gets wiped. This is the function TRIM performs in cleaning up old blocks. Since an SSD always needs some amount of free space in order to rewrite and delete data, it will actually have an amount of available space that is hidden from the OS, but even then as the drive reaches near full capacity it will still slow down as there are less available blocks to copy data to. 

 

There are also drives, including OPs Intel 660p which designate QLC nand flash to operate as SLC for caching. (SLC is much faster than QLC, but QLC allows for more capacity/density) When the drive is empty, more QLC is assigned as SLC cache. As the drive fills up, that QLC being used as cache is required for storage and is no longer available to use as cache. Less cache can cause slow downs when transferring large files.

This is known as "dynamic caching"

 

Quote

The Intel SSD 660p employs a variable-size SLC cache, and all data written goes first to the SLC cache before being compacted and folded into QLC blocks. This means that the steady-state 100MB/s sequential write speed we've measured is significantly below what the drive could deliver if the writes went directly to the QLC without the extra SLC to QLC copying step getting in the way. When the drive is mostly empty, up to about half of the available flash memory cells will be treated as SLC NAND. As the drive fills up, blocks will be converted to QLC usage, shrinking the size of the cache and making it more likely that a real-world use case could write enough to fill that cache.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13078/the-intel-ssd-660p-ssd-review-qlc-nand-arrives

 

So for the 512GB Intel 660p that @Joltzz has, an empty drive will have 76GB of 'SLC' cache available. The available SLC cache will be reduced to only 6GB if the drive is >75% full.

 

This shouldn't hurt gaming load time performance too much, however if you were transferring large files, such as raw 4k videos/editing then you may see some performance loss when writing to the drive once the cache is exhausted.

 

To answer your original question. It's okay to install games on your SSD. If you have some available space on the drive after your operating system and other files, then it can be a good idea to install a few of your favourite/most played games to the SSD to help with load times. Keep in mind not all games will see an improvement being on an SSD. Most improved are games which have loading screens while the game loads in new areas and textures.

Try to keep some available space on the drive as well so functions like trim and dynamic caching can work optimally... However you'll always have at least 6GB of SLC cache as well as some available space hidden in the drive for TRIM, so even if you completely fill the drive it will still work (though in some situations you may see slight performance loss from the drive).

[Joltzz]

Thx guys I won’t be doing any heavy file transfers just wanted to know if my games would load fast this is a cool topic once again thx for the help