SSD for my rebuild - discussion

[#1]

At present there appears to be a price break point with SSD's where going from 100GB to 250GB is not much of an increase but after that it is almost a linear cost/capacity relationship.
Now this is all well and good but looking at my present usage
The system drive plus My Documents is about 130GB so a 250GB would be large enough for the foreseeable future but would be useless for storing games.where 30GB plus now seems to be the norm.
So my real question is whether there is any merit in getting a 500GB SSD drive or indeed 2 x 250GB SSD or whether a single 250GB  with my present 1TB hard drive would be the way to go as I understand that the only advantage of an SSD in games is loading times with no effect on frame rates
There is another option - keep the bulk of the games on the HDD but move/reload the current used games to the SSD
Thoughts please
Of course the other factor is whether PCIe M2 drives will ever become cost effective and whether the speed increase would be really noticeable

[#2]

SSD for OS and main applications and mydocs.
big mechanical HDD for storage

[#3]

You can never have too much space on your SSD, I bought a 256Gb one on a Black Friday deal about 2 years ago, now despite constant thinning out it has just 85 Gb left, all of my music/video/pics are on a 7200 rpm 2Tb HDD, other stuff  is on a slower 5400 rpm 2Tb HDD.
I've already bought a 500Gb Samsung EVO SSD & another Pioneer BD-XL drive as upgrades, don't need any memory got 16Gb of that. Just need to update the GFX card as well!

[#4]

so what would you have on the SSD where the improved access/loading would be of a real benefit

[#5]

I can't answer accurately because, not being a gamer, I have no knowledge of how games operate or what it takes to optimise them. But...
If the game is intelligent enough to do look ahead to preload into memory the code and data it might need and the issue is simply fast startup, then the best option is probably as big an SSD as you need to install the OS and the games.
If the game is less smart, and needs to go to disk very frequently while playing (which may slow the response if not the frame rate), then you probably have two or three options. The first is a big SSD as before. The second is one of those hybrid  hard drives. The third ( assuming you have a suitable chipset/motherboard) is an SSD for the OS and a smaller one (64GB max?) to act as a cache for the  mechanical drive using Intel's smart response technology http://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/architecture-and-technology/smart-response-technology.html

[#6]

Quote from: Oldjim

so what would you have on the SSD where the improved access/loading would be of a real benefit

The minimum possible, just the OS & Swap file, things like Office. If it's valuable, then keep your "working" copies of stuff on another disc or on a USB stick/SD card.

[#7]

All i have on my SSD is The OS and my games ,Program's,  Docs,Photo, music etc are on my 1TB
all program's are installed on my 1TB , as they dont need as much speed to start , main advantage for me is faster loading for games  

[#8]

That was my thought also - re Games - as frame rate tests don't show any advantage as you would expect with enough memory so it doesn't use the swap file
However loading times - specially while playing - would be a real benefit
One thing I did find out was that with Steam Games you can move them between drives fairly easily as you can now setup steam to use two different drives for games storage
I wouldn't go for a hybrid drive as they are rather old technology with the price of SSD's dropping all the time

[#9]

I have a 500GB SSD and when first installed with W7 64bit I diverted all program installations to another drive.
I found some stuff getting its knickers in a twist and most programs stored data and configuration on the SSD anyway no matter what I did.
On a second installation I let everything install on its default (SSD) and relocated the Libraries to another drive.
Currently the SSD has 393GB free and 73GB used out of an available 466GB

[#10]

That means that if either device crashes or otherwise burns out you will have nothing.
Could you not clone your SSD to the hard drive so that you have some kind of backup?

[#11]

Not sure who this addressed to but as at present I backup my system drive automatically and my data daily - both to a separate hard drive/computer
I don't backup my games drive as it is firstly too big and secondly it can all be reinstalled if necessary

[#12]

In my case the data drive has a weekly backup.
The SSD has an hourly incremental backup.

[#13]

My intention, when I bought my first 60GB SSD, was to have the OS and any apps that I wanted to load quickly installed on it. This worked well for some time especially as some of the video editing apps could take a while to load from HDD. Unfortunately, there were times where I forgot my plans and automatically installed all apps onto the SSD so now it only has 1.35GB free. I have a swap file on an internal HDD but with 16GB RAM it rarely gets used.
I have got another 100GB SSD installed and that is used for temp files especially when rendering which gives some great speed improvements.
I am in two mind as to whether it would be better to switch the usage between the two SSDs by making an image of the 60GB and copying that to the 100GB and making that the boot or simply uninstalling the apps that don't really have any benefit of loading any faster from SSD and re-installing them on HDD. I suppose I could install them on the 100GB SSD instead.
It's something I need to address soon.

[#14]

I have a Mushkin Chronos 120GB SSD and a 1TB Western Digital Blue HDD in my gaming desktop, the 1TB stores the required files, the Mushkin holds the OS and programs that require the associated files on the HDD, makes for a faster computer for sure, even if it's a Core2Duo E6550... 
Heck, when starting up, the windows logo is barely onscreen before asking for my password...

[#15]

@oj current thinking seems to be get as big and ssd as you can comfortably afford, or get multiple smaller ones and add in a 64gb ssd as the swap file /temp file storage location if your focus is purely speed for in use programs /games with the majority of stuff stored on a standard 7200 spinning disk
personally I have the my docs file origin and steam all on separate tb drives (all wd black 1 or 2 tb units) with the os and most program files on the ssd (Samsung evo 840 pro 256gb)
if I was buying to build a new pc i'd probably do this and limit the ram to 8gb as ram costs more than the ssd's do most of the time.....