New SSD…now what?
 

So I just received an SSD as a gift. I’ve never had one before but am excited about setting it up and getting into my games that much faster. I know a ton of you have SSDs so I hope someone can answer a quick question. My pc is pretty much devoted to gaming and has Windows 10, which I’ve noticed can be a hard drive hog at times. Would it be better to put the OS on the SSD or the games themselves. Looking for the biggest “bang for my buck” I guess.

Thanks in advance for any guidance!

Why choose one or the other, depending on size you could have both.. if it's small go for games.

If it's 500GB or bigger, use it as OS and Games. If it is half that size…really depends on where you want the speed boost and if you want to keep cleaning up C due to a lack of capacity.

Depends on size of ssd and number of games/size of games you have.

In general you will get more bang per buck if you put the games on the ssd. Booting might be annoying but most of the speed impact while playing a game is from disk access for assets. The specifics depends on the type of games you play. If you ever played a large rpg (path of eternity; divinity original sin; wasteland 2) you will notice more slow downs due to disk i/o than many shooters.

Then again if you are the sort that reboot your system every 10 minutes; perhaps putting the os there would be best…

Thanks for the replies all. It’s a 500gb 860 EVO SSD. I try to keep my installled games limited to those I’m actively playing but this sometimes tends to range between 6-15 games. The games do include some fairly sizable ones like PoE, Fortnite, TW3, etc. I suppose I could put both the OS AND games on the SSD but then what would be left on the 1tb hard drive? I don’t store movies, music, or any other large files as this is solely a gaming machine. I figured sharing the load between the SSD and the hard drive would be most efficient…but as I said I have zero experience with SSDs.

Put both OS and games on the SSD, and redirect your data folders (pictures/music/documents/downloads/appdata) to the 1tb drive.

Put both in the SSD, and keep your old HD for things you don't load much and for your documents folder.

One caveat: the documents folder is also used as a savegame folder by some games.

By most games i'd say.

I’d argue that best practice would be to move all savegames, including Steam savegames redirected to the data drive. It will still load faster than if it were a mechanical HDD only system, because most of the heavy lifting is still done by the OS and application. Another benefit is the ability to wipe and recover your boot drive after catastrophic failure, while not even touching your precious data. Or even easily swap that data to a completely different system.

I do something similar but my data drives usually consist of a software raid 1/5/6 setup. I’ve found this is usually the best mix of price, speed, simplicity and reliability. Especially with Win10.

Ideally a multiple SSD setup would be the way to go, and those 1TB SSDs are coming down in price, but some of us have kids to feed.

You can remap documents folder to different drive other than C so to your data storage drive.

I would only put the games on the sdd; leave the boot disk alone. There are various reasons for this but the biggest is that you don't want to blow out your boot disk and then have updates fail in a bad way.
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The only kicker is you might want to put your document folder on the ssd (for quick saves while playing games); you can do this via hardlink (forget ms term for a hardlink) or a softlink (again forget ms term). The catch in making the link are two folds first the recent windows 10 update did bad thing when folks did that sort of thing; the second is that if you run out of space on the ssd your games won't save :)

My advice is to test specific games if you have time. I put some of the games on HDD and some on my boot SSD. For example, I put Pillars of Eternity and STALKER on SSD and the difference is huge, but for games like Overwatch or Path of Exile There wasn't much difference, so I put them on HDD. Then again, I only have a 250GB SSD and I also use it for Premiere/Photoshop scratch disk.

Generally, mmos have almost no benefit from being kept on ssd.
When asked what to buy ny some acquaitances, if a person is mmo junkie I suggest spending $ for better internet instead of buying ssd.

I have a 768 SSD and I mainly have just my OS and my modded games on it (FNV, FO4, and Skyrim) to help speed up loading time especially with a lot of texture mods. I have pictures, videos, and other stuff like that remapped to my data (1TB HD) drive. Most save games are on the SSD. All mods and mod managers are also on the SSD. Can't do much else as I only have about 160 GB free on the SSD and I like a cushion.

Then on my DATA drive I keep all my mod work, back-ups, images, and another game folder for all other games I have installed - which at the moment is 5 as I seldom have many games installed and unless it is a favorite ongoing game like Beth ones I remove them when done.

That way whenever I install a game I have some option where to install it. I also have an external drive I keep some back-ups on and my most critical files are also backed up online.

That's fine. Save files don't affect game speed (unless you're quick-saving/reloading every 5 seconds). Save files are usually small, a few MBs, the process of loading the game assets is what makes a game slow.

Not on PC. On SATA2 HDD based machines on the other hand…

Thanks everyone for the thoughts and guidance. I really appreciate it! Now to set some time aside to install the SSD and move everything around!

On linux this is trivial on windows it is brain dead pia because of the arse wit registar design. God or nature or whatever invented people but morons invented windows.

Always put your Windows OS on your fastest drive, usually an SSD. I have most of my older games on a standard spinner though reserving my SSD for my massive, heavy, and slow loading games because it's at least 5 times faster than the fastest SATA Mylar platter drives, I believe. I was overjoyed to get my first SSD a few years ago. Last year I got my first NVMe M.2 SSD drive which is about 5 times as fast as a standard SSD (2,500 MB/sec) though it's wasted on gaming and just about 90% of everything else.