There any good ssds to get for games?

I have a 512gb nvme, I have a few games on it but other things are taking up space on the drive, I would like a dedicated game launch drive, and seeing that my dedicated game drive has more or less died, it still reads but can’t write without a landmine being hit and it not relocating, I think this would be a good time to get a game ssd, because this is games, I don’t care too much about performance or how good the drive is so long as if it dies they will replace it under a warranty, I just want it to be able to maintain a read speed thats, if I remember where the point of diminishing returns is correctly, around 400mb.

I haven’t really paid attention to what’s good in the last 2-3 years because I already have my computer and its good, so I don’t know if anything really changed in the ssd landscape. I don’t want an m.2 if possible, because using the other m.2 on my computer kills 2-4 of my sata ports, I forget which number it is.

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Option 1: get a couple TB hard drive, as in HDD hard drive. Have super high capacity and live with 2 seconds longer load times and a bit of noise when it spins up. I have a hard drive and I’m super happy with it. 6 years no issues.
Option 2: Get any 480/512GB SSD. Honestly as long as it have warranty it’s fine. I’m an ADATA fanboy so I can just tell you get SU630 for super cheap or the higher end SU750 if you want a bit more stability and sustained speeds. You may also think about WD Green for cheap or blue for not so cheap. Crucial drives also seems to be well regarded and aren’t too expensive. Samsung is expensive, but if you find cheap-ish Samsung drives, they seems to be super high regarded by the general public…

lol, the load times aren’t substantially better sure, a few games I play do see loads go from a minute to about 10 seconds, but the more egregious ones are where I will have 2-3 load times that all benefit from ssd back to back because im farming the area now, that game got moved to the nvme.

as for the rest, I went with a 16tb drive that will be here soon, I get a general hdd for everything for a few years, then boot the games to a dedicated drive again, and get the 16tb for another few years baring something big happening with hamr

will probably go adata looking at how some of their drives perform paired next to a samsung

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I run crucial MX500 SATA drives for my NAS. They have a 5 year warranty so … that would be my suggestion.

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IMO: ssd for open world games to help streaming assets. hdds for all else, since it wont hurt performance there

Like you mentioned earlier, I appreciate an ssd for a game with a lot of loading screens, like transitions into/out of buildings, or changing scene etc

you can do like wendell send in one of the recent video a get a used intel nvme ssd. 4tb for 367$ US or 1.2 tb for 99.95$ US

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I run EVO 860s for games. My gaming/workstation box is 100% SSD, all 3.5 TB of it.

But these days, if they’re for gaming almost any SSD will do 500MB/sec in SATA form, and they all have more than sufficient write endurance for gaming which is rather light on writes.

Pretty simply - buy a brand name (crucial/toshiba/samsung/kingston/whatever) that is on sale.

Some games are drastically faster from SSD, it’s not even close. Dragon Age: Origins is one of these for example. In other games, SSD results in less stutter when streaming in game assets in open world games, etc.

IMHO, SSD is “cheap enough” that hard drives now are relegated to archival storage - backups and the like. Maybe buy a spinning disk to do steam backups to if you can’t get quite as much SSD capacity as you’d like, so you can remove games you aren’t playing and re-load them a lot quicker than downloading, from the local backup.

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Why not do a bit of both and use a tool like primocache to use the 2nd ssd as a cache for the HD.

SSDs wear out the more you delete data from them. Using SSD as cache - yes, it will be fast, but you will kill your write cycles in no time.
Just using it as the game dedicated drive is not a bad idea, since you can install game, play 5 years of it and not delete it and your SSD will be perfectly fine.

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The whole SSD write cycle death thing is paranoia.

Storage review did a torture test years ago. Even on 250 gb drives you need to write multiple petabytes on drives even from 2012 to get them to die from wear.

They had them set up being re written at full speed for many months to achieve that.

By the time a modern SSD dies (from wear as opposed to other failure) you will want to replace it anyway.

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True but that test was not done on QLC chips, I’d assume. And I don’t think the layering of data into NAND will stop there either.

Anyway, the takeaway is this: SSD storage is at a price point and availability today where for the majority of people it is possible to put their game library exclusively on solid state drives. The spinning rust can live in your secondary NAS, that only does backups. :stuck_out_tongue:

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well, they were MLC drives, so had like 10 times the expected write cycles, but trim nowadays, and the lower cost negates what was the problem.

Yes flash cells will burn out quicker, but drives have more of them (or more dense ones) and on the whole are cheaper.

Considering the OP’s case, relatively cheap QLC drives would do fine, as you said, write endurance isn’t such a drawback as the later days of MLC/early TLC, when prices were a lot more than they are now

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Recommend a 500gb-1tb sata SSD. 500gb is around where a sata SSD is going to pretty much always saturate the SATA 3 connection for reads and most writes. Also I’ve not come across a game so far where the benefit going from sata to NVMe is particularly tangible. Just make sure they’re not DRAM-less SSDs. FF14 has a nice benchmark that shows loadtimes inbetween all its scenes and its generally about 8-10% between a sata SSD and NVMe drive

Samsung, etc. are still offerring similar warranty on writes with QLC to what they were with MLC. And for games? You won’t be writing anywhere near that. You’ll re-write the entire SSD maybe once or twice in its lifetime in terms of write cycles. Seriously. Think about how often you remove and reinstall or reformat a steam library.

The conversation at that point was not about just storing a bunch of games. Remember? :wink:


I agree. Hence my recommendation for Crucial MX500.

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660p is cheap and read perf is good write is mixed depending on a few factors

Hmm, prices are same as SATA drives. Comes down to do you want to waste NVME / PCIe options on storage for games or not? Performance in games will be almost the same.

But … potato / potato. :wink:

No, this is fact…
It’s a fact constant rewriting will wear down the nand flash. It’s a fact that the flash will last longer if you don’t rewrite it constantly.
Maybe the controller or the power plug will break long before the nand does, but that doesn’t make it paranoia.
I see your point though. Still I would not use an SSD as cache. Your ram is always always faster.

:stuck_out_tongue:

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