how much of a difference does an ssd make while playing games and doing school work?

[Legolessed]

same question

[FirstArmada]

Boot up time & loading of files

[Legolessed]

Just now, FirstArmada said:

Boot op time loading of files

if im on a very tight budget is it worth it to get an ssd or just get a hard drive

[Alice in game]

For same budget, do you prefer size or speed ?

[Legolessed]

1 minute ago, Alice in game said:

For same budget, do you prefer size or speed ?

speed but i dont want to have 16 gigabytes of storage space on my computer

[Alice in game]

My windows in on a 250Go drive and I have 60 Gb free and 120 worth of video (that I should sort and transfer to my larger drive). So let's say I use 70Gb for windows, software and maybe 1 game, that's still give you some space. Of course, don't plan to install 50 5Gb games at once. Might require some cleaning from time to time, but not impossible.

As SSD are fater, you have less load time, so for gaming it's positive. 

For school, it depending of what subject you study., It does not improve paper writing speed, tha't for sure.

I never had a ssd, but have 6Tb of HDD, so I have a different priority.

[FirstArmada]

whats your budget?

[suchamoneypit]

For me, the most worthwhile upgrade I've done is my SSD. My boot times are WAY faster. As someone who overclocks and enters bios and then back into desktop to run benchmarks/stress test this has literally saved me hours. No longer do I get upset over "You PC must now restart" because its so damn quick I don't even care, where before I would have to sit and wait for 5 minutes.

 

A big factor being how long it takes my desktop to load and my HDD to be free to do other things (2-3 minutes vs 10-15 seconds). Launching programs and navigating around is also insanely quick. With spare space I store games, some games see nice improvements in load times (Star Citizen, Skyrim, Ryse:Son of Rome) while others that are really internet dependent don't (MMO's like eve online)

[Curufinwe_wins]

Honestly, if you consider the opportunity cost of an SSD over even a year of use you won't regret it.

 

Lets outline a Fermi approximation for it.

 

Suppose you start your computer 3 times a week and an SSD shaves a total of 20 seconds off boot times (considering how poorly unresponsive some HDDs can get years down the line this is fairly conservative.)

 

In a year's time, you will save about an hour of time (about a minute a week).

 

Suppose you open an office program (word, outlook, powerpoint, excel, etc) 3 times a day, and the SSD saves you 5 seconds each (again not unreasonable, outlook and word in particular have very poor response times that scale well with storage speed. Indeed RAM caching these programs makes them launch nearly instantaneously. Trust me I do it.)

 

Over the course of a year, you will save an hour and a half of time.

 

Now suppose you install 5 new large games a year (perhaps a bit much, but any program will show what I mean), an SSD can save 10-30 minutes per installation (lets say 10 conservatively. File unpacking is insanely faster on an SSD).

 

Over the course of a year that is around another hour.

 

Now consider loading times playing those games (Open World/MMO RPG's are by far the worst offenders. Sometimes showing 10 second to 3 minute improvements per event.)

 

 

Since there are SO many variables that depend on those games (and loading times themselves are so variable), lets combine this with all other program loading times at a rate of one hour per year.

 

This suggests that by conservative approximation, you might save 4.5 hours per year over an HDD. At an opportunity cost of 15 dollars per hour (arbitrary), this corresponds to nearly 70 dollars saved every year.

 

Thus a 250 GB ssd nearly pays for itself in the first year.

 

Now consider that SSDs last basically forever, and the benefits to older systems are almost always exponentially larger (capable of turning a core2duo machine into a very very responsive and agile HTPC), I would ALWAYS recommend buying one.

 

That said, please under no circumstances buy 120GB or smaller SSDs. They are slower, have worse value, and leave relatively little usable space once the 'bare necessities' are installed.

[Mark77]

Let's just say that there is no way in h*ll that my 9-year-old laptop would have survived not only XP, but Vista, Windows 7, and now Windows 10 without having been upgraded to a SSD.  At first a first-gen Samsung PM800, and now an Intel 330. 

 

I can't even begin to fathom people using hard drives for booting a Windows 10 machine of any kind.  It just seems so hideous. 

 

Its rather unfortunate that one company that purported to cater to OverClockerZ created so many junky SSDs that people actually came to believe that SSDs generally were less reliable than hard drives.  Set back SSD adoption and consumer confidence enormously, especially in the enterprise.  I know early SSD buyers, of either the Samsung, and subsequently, the Intel models, just couldn't fathom the hatchet job that a single company's products were having on the entire industry when the Samsung/Intel products were relatively trouble free and a dramatic improvement in reliability over HDDs in mobile applications.