Because they still hold far more, you can fill up 1 TB SSD fairly fast with games involved, especially AAA games, have you seen how big quite a few new ones are? 500 GB SSD+1 TB HDD on my laptop and the HDD is 2/3 full already.
Also, HDDs are slow compared to SSDs but they aren’t that slow, I have another computer running only on a HDD and runs fine already.
I will say SSDs are a goto for a boot operating system IF you have room in your system for 2+ drives, they are at least cheap enough for that and their price is getting there.
I agree and it your a premium gamer. Most games target about 8G ram so having 16G of ram with windows or linux. That is 8G of cache that’s at ram speed and unbeatable.
In 2019 I would say a hard core gamers could go 32G ram so the OS can cache 24G or so of data. Cached in RAM is orders of magnitude faster that NVME. AAA games are topping in over 100G+ now.
Good thing is ram pricing is coming down !
Every tech tuber site will benchmark loading times on games for performance. It’s a rubbish metric. Having almost all the game assets cached by the OS makes for far smother / never hitch game play.
Straying off-topic but quoted for truth. Unless you’re playing (for example) a FPS that limits the play area to something the size of a shoebox, you’re always loading/unloading as you move around the map. I mainly play in open worlds and boy-oh-boy does 32GB of RAM make a difference to smoothness when you revisit areas. Lets you push/max out your Far Draw Range with no regret as well. Highly recommended.
That would certainly be one extensive library I should think. To be fair, it probably wouldn’t take me long to reach half that amount (external storage included) but that would make me a johnny-come-lately. I’m too busy building PCs and being a Dad to even begin using them they way I want to. Alas, I fear I’ve been stripped of my badges and it looks as though I will never be Colonel Klunk after all. Time waits for no one. Meh, why stop now? Go Peta. Going Peta could be a tempting prospect but I really believe the quality of mechanical drives is starting to bottom out so again, is it worth it?
I had to return so many mechanical drives in 2017/2018 that I stopped, counted my losses , and resolved not to buy mechanical drives anymore. (For myself, of course.) Admittedly, I live in a rather isolated part of northernish Canada so perhaps the drives I order are consistently being damaged in shipping . I honestly don’t know what the deal is. I don’t think S.M.A.R.T and Crystal Disk are lying and I don’t think my main board is eating hard drives.
Perhaps the fellow in this thread promoting used Enterprise grade hard drives has a point but there’s just something about buying hard drives from E-Bay with 4 years of usage logged on them that strikes me as somewhat unfavorable. I’ve had horrible results with brand new hybrid drives as well. There was a time when I thought it might be my work station killing my mechanical drives. I’ve since ruled that out having access to over a half dozen PCS every day to play with. Nope. I’m convinced: Quality and craftsmanship of mechanical drives – at least for the domestic market – is steadily dropping.
48 TB of Enterprise drives is a little rich for my blood unless of course I buy very used drives. There is a way around this and I expect I won’t rule it out. In the past decade I’ve only had one SSD fail on me. In the past 20 YEARS I’ve only had two SSDs fail on me. (The first one was an OCZ 60 GB made for SATA II). I’d say that’s a pretty good failure rate. Not perfect but good. As for mechanical drives… Cough I’ve lost track of how many have died on me in the past ten years. Waaay too many. I might have to give my Colonel Klunk badge to someone else coz I’m not about to purchase many more in the future. Looks to me like Sergeant Awesome Sauce could use a promotion anyway. As for me I’m ready to retire from klunk drives.
I think you nailed it in that post. SSDs are remarkably dependable, I find. Yes, people should be free to buy what they wish and I respect that. As a PC builder I try to make sure my clients are well-informed before they start shelling out for hard drives. One thing that never ceases to baffle me is why people insist on putting mechanical drives in lap tops. It really isn’t economical when the mechanical drive is constantly being jostled about or worse. But the customer has the last word so … Well, I don’t do laptops anymore (my eyes are growing dim) except maybe for family members, in which case SSDs are the rule.
Older tech is seen as tried and true, in addition to being less expensive?
Also the hard limits on number-of-rewrites with flash memory is a bit terrifying; TechReport’s SSD Endurance Experiment shows that some drives will brick themselves, rather than show up as read-only when they die.
You can argue that the drive should stop being used long before then, or that proper TRIM support and good firmware will keep that from being a problem, but if you are unfamiliar with SSDs, you might not know how to avoid that.
On a technical front, maybe you’ve finally gotten an understanding of which HDD S.M.A.R.T. values to keep an eye on, and you don’t want to reset your knowledge in the land of SSDs.
Does SMART and TRIM even get carried over USB, if you are using it as a back-up drive?
Good answer and good question. I quoted the question. Once upon a time I kept getting SMART reports on a Western Digital mechanical drive I was using for back up. It was the only WD drive I owned so I paid no attention to it. Yes, it was an external USB drive so I really don’t know how SMART employs this but about a week later 3TB of data went out the window. Interestingly enough it was the bridge (SATA/USB) that failed and not the actual mechanical drive itself. No, that failure occurred the year following. So I guess SMART will work on USB drives or, perhaps SMART was trying to work on an external drive but was failing?, or SMART killed my drive? (I doubt it), or, SMART only responded as a result of a failing SATA/USB bridge? I dunno but there you have it. I reiterate: I’ve had sooo many mechanical hard drives fail on me in the past two years that buying SSDs not only seems safer but in the long run a good deal more economical as well.
I confess that I still use a floppy drive occasionally, probably out of sentiMENTAL reasons more than anything else. There’s just something about the sound of a floppy drive booting that gives one a feeling of reassurance that all is well. I’m probably dating myself but :::shrugs::: what can I say? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H13pIS3ZXO8
