Boot drive size

[Freshmeat1]

 

Country: Sweden

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Boot drive but maybe also as storage if needed

 

Hi I am going to build my first computer soon and was wondering what size I should have on the boot drive. I was thinking on going with the Kingston A2000 1 TB. I will mainly use it for gaming and allround.

 

 

[SEAL62]

It depends on your budget put typically you would choose a rather small but high quality boot SSD and a larger storage SSD or HDD.

[mariushm]

I'd go for a 500 GB drive of better quality .. for example a WD SN550 or something else that uses TLC memory.

 

500 GB is enough for the operating system and a handful of games, everything else can sit on regular mechanical drives.

[Wh0_Am_1]

7 minutes ago, Freshmeat1 said:

 

Country: Sweden

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Boot drive but maybe also as storage if needed

 

Hi I am going to build my first computer soon and was wondering what size I should have on the boot drive. I was thinking on going with the Kingston A2000 1 TB. I will mainly use it for gaming and allround.

 

 

Alright, with a separate mass storage drive (512 or larger) you can get away with a 120GB SSD or cruise with a 240gb SSD for your boot, otherwise I would recommend a terabyte or larger.

[AlwaysFSX]

1 minute ago, Wh0_Am_1 said:

you can get away with a 120GB SSD

Nooooooooo you cannot. 240 would be an absolute minimum.

[SkyeAwoo]

I would say minimally 250-300 GB for the boot drive but that is just me. Mine is 500 GB and I partitioned only 350 GB and left the rest to keep the speed up.

[SEAL62]

2 minutes ago, AlwaysFSX said:

Nooooooooo you cannot. 240 would be an absolute minimum.

Why should 240 be the minimum?

[Freshmeat1]

Yes I was planing on having a 2 TB ssd as my main storage

[mariushm]

6 minutes ago, SEAL62 said:

Why should 240 be the minimum?

You could install an operating system in 120 GB, but 240 GB+ are only a few dollars more expensive and offer much better performance. 

Flash manufacturers optimized their production to make big  flash chips, so nowadays the smallest chips you could get in volume  are probably 64 GB sized, so if you make a 120 GB SSD you either use 2  64 GB chips, or a single 128 GB chip. 

 

So little memory makes it hard for the ssd controller to use multiple channels to increase speed (for example only 2 out of 4 channels may be used with 120 GB) so you get reduced performance. 

With 240-250 GB you also have a lot more empty space so you get more writes, more endurance... 

 

The 120 GB drives are also cheap cheap cheap, race to the bottom, so profits tend to be very low, which encourages manufacturers to use lower grade / lower quality flash chips... for example the drive could have a 256 GB flash chip that was tested and had lots of errors and ended up with maybe 140-160 GB functional flash inside, so they marked it as 128 GB and the ssd controller has to make a lot of juggling to avoid areas of bad flash memory and may have to use error correction more often.

 

[SEAL62]

@mariushm that is a valid point but still no real reason to say that 240 is the hard bottom limit. Depends on your budget I'd say. If you plan on putting a 3090 in your system then hell no, get away from 210Gb SSDs but if your budget is only enough for some used parts then why not use a 120GB boot ssd?

[mariushm]

@SEAL62

 

Because even if your total budget is 400-500$  , the price difference between a 120 GB SSD and a 240 GB SSD is maybe 5-10$, which is less than 1% of your budget and maybe 20-30% extra .. so you get double capacity for half  the price more.

 

For example cheapest >=120 GB SSD on PCPartPicker is TEAM MS30 128 GB at 21.49$ followed by TEAM GX2 128 GB SATA at 21.99$ and Inland Professional 120 GB at 23$ 

 

The 240+ GB drives are 29.99$ for 256 GB TEAM MS30 or 31$ for  a Gigabyte SATA SSD... so 30$ vs 21.5$  ... do the math.  Last but not least, you'll often get discounts or weekend deals on 240-256 GB sticks, bringing the price down further. 

 

If your budget is SO TIGHT, you're better off buying a SINGLE STICK OF RAM and buying the SECOND STICK a month or two from now, at your next paycheck.  

Your computer would still be usable with only one stick for that period, and will work perfectly fine when you install the 2nd stick, as if you never used the pc with only one stick, while the bad ssd purchase will haunt you for as long as you have the computer. 

 

 

 

 

[SEAL62]

@mariushm Yeah, can't really argue with that

learnt something new today, thanks

[Wh0_Am_1]

26 minutes ago, AlwaysFSX said:

Nooooooooo you cannot. 240 would be an absolute minimum.

until just a few months ago I was using 120GB SSD and was fine I never filled it over 80GBs, 240 is ideal though

[Freshmeat1]

Okey thanks for all your inputs and with that in mind I think I´m going to go with either the Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500 GB or the Corsair Force MP510 480 GB 

 

Thanks 

 

[Aereldor]

Theoretically you could get away with even a 60gb drive for windows. For practical purposes the sweet spot to me is getting a 1TB NVMe drive. You can get fast ones for reasonably cheap and they tend to have the best price-to-capacity ratio. The Inland Premium 1tb nvme drives are regularly sub-$100

[Freshmeat1]

7 minutes ago, Aereldor said:

Theoretically you could get away with even a 60gb drive for windows. For practical purposes the sweet spot to me is getting a 1TB NVMe drive. You can get fast ones for reasonably cheap and they tend to have the best price-to-capacity ratio. The Inland Premium 1tb nvme drives are regularly sub-$100

Looks like a really good m.2 for the price but i can´t get it here i Sweden. If I wanted to buy it I would have to get it shipped from North America to the EU and it is going to cost a fair bit in in port fee. But thanks anyway 

[mariushm]

You should be able to order from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.de  ... I think they ship to Sweden and nordic countries. 

 

As they're shipped from within EU (well, amazon.co.uk is technically no longer in EU) the shipping is cheap and you don't pay customs (which are small anyway) and they recalculate the VAT using the one of your country.

 

I suspect the Samsung 970 evo plus would be expensive, paying for the samsung brand, and the corsair mp510 should be fine but you can probably also do better there for the money.

[AlwaysFSX]

3 hours ago, SEAL62 said:

Why should 240 be the minimum?

Programs that still force installing files in the C drive, even if you specify another location. Sym links only gonna be so fun.

[Freshmeat1]

20 hours ago, mariushm said:

You should be able to order from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.de  ... I think they ship to Sweden and nordic countries. 

 

As they're shipped from within EU (well, amazon.co.uk is technically no longer in EU) the shipping is cheap and you don't pay customs (which are small anyway) and they recalculate the VAT using the one of your country.

 

I suspect the Samsung 970 evo plus would be expensive, paying for the samsung brand, and the corsair mp510 should be fine but you can probably also do better there for the money.

I will be sure to keep it in mind when i am going to buy.