So I'm working on some research to help me choose components for a tower build. I don't know much about computer hardware so this is the place for me to go! I've done a bit of digging on the forms already and have some general knowledge thus far.
(Any references to specifics are just examples i.e. STEAM,WoW, any other games with clients)
Question 1: If I am playing video games on my SSD, will my performance be hindered by things I do on my HDD (browsing and such). Perhaps this is all determined by my CPU and they are not related much at all.
Question 2: Does filling up a SSD/ HDD passed a certain capacity actually slow it down at all? Ex (If the max is 120Gb and I only have 40 Gb left).
Question 3: Is it possible to install clients on the HDD and just have it install the games on the SSD? (Ex STEAM Client on my HDD and "7 days to die" on my SSD)
These are the only questions I could come up with for now. I'm sure one of you fine people can answer these in simple term for me to understand.
Question one, I don't quite grasp what you mean, so your asking if having a SSD and a hard drive would reduce performance of a computer? or would it effect your hard drive? You would notice a big performance boost doing anything on the SSD compared to a HDD.
Question two, well filling either a SSD or a HDD isn't the best idea. SSDs can only sustain so many writes so keeping some free space is a good idea, with a HDD just keep some space free and defrag it every now and then (don't use the normal windows defragment tool, and DO NOT DEFRAG AN SSD!)
Question three. Yes you can, you just add an install directory, I have Steam client on one drive with a few games and a few other games on another drive.
Question 1: If you are asking "Will reading or writing to/from my HDD while playing a game that is on my SDD slow down my game?" then the answer is no. The CPU sees little strain from reading/writing going on with drives. That has more to do with the mobo bridges, SATA port controllers, etc, and the drives themselves. It's all very complicated but the short answer is no. I use Open Broadcast Software to record a game that is on HDD X while saving said recording to HDD Y. The only performance drop I see is form OBS, not the drives.
Question 2: @anon43112114 has that pretty well covered. Fully maxing a drive is problematic, but... not necassarily a bad thing. After all, most of the time drives automatically retain part of the space. Ever notice that your 1TB drive doesn't actually have 1TB? That's part of the reason why.
Question 3: again, @anon43112114 is on the money there. My question is... why? Clients take up little space (ie, battle.net or steam, so why separate the clients and games?) and, sure, it's fancy spancy to have your games on a SSD but... why? You won't see any in game performance boosts (ie. higher FPS). The only thing you'll notice is faster load screens. And, frankly, they won't be THAT much better (depending on the game type). If you have the money to buy 500GB+ SSDs for games, knock yourself out. I'm just saying it's not cost efficient yet.
@Tek_Elf I appreciate your response. I had always been under the impression that it would increase my FPS and gaming in general. I will honestly probably rethink that just for sake of the cost.
I think that sums this all up. I appreciate the help!
Nope, games are specifically coded to not have their moment-to-moment performance dependent on a drive. Anything and everything needed by a game at any given time is loaded into RAM because a CPU processing directly from a drive would be so slow that games would not exist (no software would exist lol). And that is why load screens exist; that's the data being pulled from the drive to the RAM and such.
If you have any other questions related to games (I take it games is the main focus of this build), feel free to ask.
Filling up a HDD will slow it down. In Windows if the capacity bar graph turns red, start deleting files. Filling up an SSD will KILL it. I learned the hard way. Try to have double the capacity than you will use.